


star chaser

by cygnus (sunsprite)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Childhood Friends, Fluff and Angst, Growing Up Together, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn, there is (1) stargazing @ a beach scene, unreliable narrator seungmin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28978263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsprite/pseuds/cygnus
Summary: “I literally have five cents in my pocket.Youhave a dollar.”“This is where our bad personalities come in handy,” Minho whispers in a conspiratorial voice, pointing at the red-lipped employee standing behind the till. “Ever haggled?”In which Kim Seungmin spends his childhood with a strange boy who saves cats stuck in trees and gives him a future.
Relationships: Kim Seungmin/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 149
Kudos: 523





	star chaser

**Author's Note:**

> [ribs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B25PAgrFQ-k&ab_channel=Lorde-Topic) by lorde & [and everything becomes a blur](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct4uSq7ayWg&ab_channel=OldFriendsRecords) by hellogoodbye were the main (mostly ambient) inspirations. ^__^
> 
>  **warnings** for implied child abuse, past death, dysfunctional families, and bullying. nothing explicit or too extreme though!
> 
> unbeta'd as always. thank you for clicking! <3

Seungmin first meets Minho when he moves into a sprawling neighborhood swathed with single family houses during the middle of summer.

The sidewalk is hot underneath the thin soles of his shoes and he feels sweat begin to accumulate on the back of his neck, dripping down between his shoulder blades. He watches grasshoppers leap across lawns with scattered cicadas thrumming in his ears when his older sister holds his hand and takes him up the steps to a decrepit bungalow.

They meet their landlord by the name of Old Jung, a distant friend of their relatives, who shows them around the furnished basement. There’s two small bedrooms between an even smaller bathroom. Seungmin hides behind his sister as Old Jung slurs his words, peeking at all the grime stuck between the tiles and the mold growing in the corners of the ceiling.

Sensing his unease, she leans down just a bit and whispers to him, “Do you want to start bringing your stuff into your room?”

Seungmin blinks up at her tired, smiling face, and nods.

He hurries past Old Jung, taking a whiff of his sweet, musty odor that reminds Seungmin of his father. Stepping back outside, Seungmin swats away a duo of mosquitoes and jerks his head away when one of them comes too close to his face.

Seungmin likes summer the least. He always wakes up with bites on his face, and his mother once told him it’s because his blood is sweet, but Seungmin doesn’t think he’s sweet at all and the mosquitoes merely prefer attacking him out of the whole population.

He goes to the trunk of the car and takes out his duffel bag. When he hears the rattling of chains and a rough crash against the pavement, Seungmin looks up and around before he spots a boy not too far away on the ground with his bike tilted over on a lawn. Seungmin’s eyes travel down to his scraped knee, glistening in red, and waits for the boy to cry. He doesn’t.

There are band-aids scattered across the boy’s face with a few on his bruised knuckles that were healing into a yellowish-green hue. He just sits there and sighs down at his knee, looking annoyed at the scrape like it was merely an inconvenience rather than an earth-shattering wound like most kids their age dramatized.

So, Seungmin takes the pouch from his bag that his sister crocheted for him and approaches the boy, looking both sides of the street when he crosses. When the boy looks up, his eyes narrow into a suspicious glare. There is a mole on his nose -- just along the ridge above his left nostril.

Seungmin ignores the stink eye and crouches down to pull out a big, Paw Patrol band-aid from his pouch. He rips off the adhesive stickers and holds it out for the boy, who’s staring at the design with a quizzical frown.

“Those are for kids,” he drawls. “I’m twelve, double digits, so I’m not a kid.”

Seungmin frowns. He tries to tack the band-aid on the boy’s knee himself, but the boy scoots back and dodges the attempt. Annoyed, Seungmin tries again and fails when the boy covers the scrape on his knee with his dirty hands, which has Seungmin gasping and trying to pry his hands away.

“Are you stupid?” he exclaims. “You’re going to make it worse!”

His outburst surprises the boy into stillness, and Seungmin quickly pastes the band-aid over the boy’s scrape with success this time. He beams and stands up before the boy tries to hurt him -- if those bruised knuckles and bandaged cheekbones were indicative of a bad temper. But he simply remains silent, only looking disgruntled at the Paw Patrol bandage, and gets up to grab his fallen bike.

“You’re welcome,” Seungmin tries.

“No thank you,” the boy retorts. He’s climbing his bike and turning it around, and before Seungmin knows it, he’s riding off towards the sun in the distance.

But then he stops mid-way. He looks over his shoulder and drags his lower eyelid down with his tongue stuck out, and Seungmin blinks at the rude gesture. The boy has an odd, distilled look of victory on his punchable face, before he turns back around and finally leaves. First day in the suburbs and Seungmin has already made an enemy out of being _kind_.

Seungmin scowls. If this is what he gets for trying to be nice, then Seungmin decides to never be nice again.

“What took you so long?” his sister asks when he marches in with his duffel bag. She’s dusting off his bedsheets, sweat glimmering along her brows. Old Jung had returned upstairs.

Seungmin drops his bag by the foot of his bed. “I got distracted by a bug -- a really big, ungrateful, mean, stupid bug.”

“Oh. Alright,” she says with uncertainty, having learned to not question his eccentricity. She shrugs and rolls up her sleeves. “Well, let’s get your stars up on that ceiling now. If we finish unpacking before the sky gets dark, we can grab dinner from that diner we passed by on the way here.”

They spend the next few minutes rearranging the glow-in-the-dark stars on Seungmin’s ceiling. He tries to recreate the same pattern he made back at their old house, but he doesn’t remember much about the old house other than the chipped statue of King Sejong his father kept in their glass cabinet, so he spreads them haphazardly around the ceiling. His sister puts up his tattered tapestries of constellations and a map of the solar system over his walls.

And then, at last, his cup of stars.

He calls it that because his little cup has stars in the bottom, and he can see the stars whenever he drinks his milk. It’s his most prized possession. He pretends the bottom of his cup is the sky he will see one day.

Seungmin puts it on his desk and eagerly looks up at his sister. She smiles and pats his head.

“It’s nothing much,” she whispers, “but this is our home now. Might as well make it feel like one, right?”

Seungmin is ten. He learns at an early age what death is and what it means for the rest of them left behind on earth. He learns what grief is when he watched his sister rip up the acceptance letter to her dream university and watched his estranged relatives walk away from responsibility. He is ten, but he doesn’t think he’s ever understood what home is.

But he looks up at the quiet determination in her eyes and has hope that surely, one day, he’ll come to learn what a true home feels like too.

“Right,” he answers, and giggles when his sister ruffles up his hair. “I’m hungry. Can we go eat now?”

“Oh, God. Yes.”

Seungmin follows her into the car and gets into the backseat. He presses his head against the window and watches trees rush by him in a blur like they were accidental smudges on an oil painting. The sky was dark and cloudy.

He fogs up the window with his breath and draws a star. He watches it fade like it was daybreak -- like it was life.

✩

Seungmin isn’t a crier.

He’s always been smart and mature for his age. That’s what his teachers in his old school used to say to him whenever he handled stupid fights he got involved in with other kids, like the one time he wouldn’t share his favourite pencil but ended up sharing it anyway just so Choi Soobin could stop crying about it.

But it’s different here, in the suburbs. It’s a rumor mill. Gossip spreads fast among the neighborhoods, especially when Old Jung already has a seedy reputation on his own. So, when a nineteen and ten year old suddenly move into the basement of his rundown house, it’s nothing but fodder for hungry families to take.

So, after summer break ends, Seungmin really should have seen it coming when a rotund thirteen year old with braces in his new school approaches him in their classroom of shared grades, and says: “Hey, new kid! You’re the orphan, right?”

His classmates begin to look at them, receding from their own bubbles of conversations to listen to theirs. Seungmin pinches his lips and continues to silently scribble down constellation names outside the margins of his notebook.

“What? Think you’re too cool to talk to me?” he taunts, dragging a chair over to sit up close to him, and chants, “Orphan! Orphan! Orphan!”

Seungmin hides his balled fists underneath his desk and gives in. “I’m not an orphan.”

“You don’t even have _fake_ parents. Of course that makes you an orphan,” he retorts matter-of-factly. “What did you do for your parents to not want you anymore and ship you off to somebody like Old Jung? Don’t you guys know that Old Jung is a big fat creep?”

“He’ll know soon enough,” somebody joins in, and they all chime with laughter.

Anger is a quick flame that eats him inside out and erupts into a forest fire, but Seungmin stays mum. He tries hard to not act how he feels. He shuts his eyes and tunes everyone’s voices out, and by the time their teacher comes back, everyone has already returned to their seats.

Class goes on like nothing happened, but so do the taunts. Every time their teacher leaves the classroom during recess, the mean comments resume. Seungmin tries to ignore it, because he's good at ignoring, but there's something so innately humiliating from the way people look at him. It only amplifies the loneliness he feels that comes from being unwanted.

Seungmin isn’t a crier. He didn’t cry at the funeral and he didn’t cry when his sister took her grief out on him. But he doesn’t like to be angry like his father either, so all that anger gets translated into tears, and that’s how he finds himself crying inside the playground’s crawl tunnel after school one day.

He stifles his sounds and tries to bury back a sob until he can feel it press down against his ribcage. Snot drips down from his nose and he wipes it away with his wet sleeve. He was running out of dry spots of his shirt to use for his face and now he feels icky and gross all over.

“Fuck,” he grumbles, echoing what his sister says whenever she messes up her eyeliner.

“Oh,” a disinterested voice says, “that’s a swear.”

Seungmin bristles. He turns his head to the other end of the crawl tunnel and finds the same mean and stupid boy sitting there, chewing his gum. He’s looking straight at Seungmin, unaffected by his snotty face, but Seungmin still feels embarrassed for getting caught so he hides his face into his arms and turns around.

“Go away,” he says.

“Okay.”

Seungmin peeks over his shoulder out of curiosity, but immediately scowls when he finds that the boy is still there, feet hiked against the metal as he plays with the rubber band around his wrist.

“Go away is a verb,” Seungmin explains. “It means you should leave the person alone and stop bothering them.”

“I _am_ leaving you alone,” he replies. “We’re being alone in the same place.”

“It doesn’t even work like that.”

“Yes it does.”

“No it doesn’t.”

The boy sighs. He looks over at him, bored eyes raking Seungmin from head to toe. “You’re an ugly crier.”

Seungmin feels his bottom lip jut out and he turns back around, shoving his face into his arms. He’s upset enough. Now, the boy he helped is giving him a weird attitude, and Seungmin realizes that he’s going to have to deal with him and everybody else in his classroom forever. He would rather share all his favourite pencils with Choi Soobin than to deal with _this_.

Fed up, he doesn’t hold back his cries anymore. Seungmin blubbers into his arms, shoulders shaking, and he hears the panicked stammers from the end of the tunnel. There’s the scrape of shoes, followed by silence, and Seungmin thinks the boy has run away until he senses someone hovering in front of him.

“I was just being honest,” the boy mumbles, awkwardly patting him on the shoulder. “Everyone’s an ugly crier, even me.”

Seungmin sniffles and wipes his nose on his pants instead. “I bet you’re the most ugly, uglier, ugliest crier.”

“Sure,” the boy says, going along with it. He rummages through the deep pockets of his shorts and pulls out a single, orange lollipop, and holds it out for Seungmin to take.

Seungmin’s bottom lip trembles. “I’m not supposed to take candy from strangers.”

“Does it _look_ like I’m going to kidnap you, dummy?”

Good point. Seungmin accepts the lollipop and unwraps it, plopping it into his mouth. He’s greeted by a sugary citrus taste. It's good and makes him feel less icky and upset. “Thanks.”

The boy shrugs. He takes out a ripped napkin from his endless space of pockets and roughly rubs at Seungmin’s face, making Seungmin yelp at the sudden attack. He swats the boy’s hand away and snatches the napkin to do it gently himself.

“Can you tell me your name?” asks Seungmin. “I don’t want to keep calling you the mean and ungrateful stupid boy in my head. It’s not very creative.”

“That’s funny. I call you the Paw Patrol Idiot in my head.”

“Nevermind. I’m just going to keep calling you the mean and stupid ungrateful boy. You don’t deserve to have a name in my head.”

The boy grins, amused. “I’m Minho.”

Seungmin sticks out his hand. “I’m Seungmin.”

“Your hand has snot germs, so I’m not going to touch it.”

Seungmin frowns and takes back his hand. He defensively mutters, “They’re not that germy.”

“So, why were you crying on my turf?” Minho asks, taking a comfortable seat beside him in the tunnel. There’s less bandages on his scratched face now, but more have accumulated on his arms, and a bruise peeks out from underneath the wide collar of his t-shirt. “Nobody ever comes here ‘cause they know it’s my territory, but since you’re new, I’ll let you off the hook. You _did_ get your boogers all over my tunnel, though, so I deserve to at least know why.”

Seungmin instinctively looks down to search for boogers, but then Minho laughs at him and Seungmin feels his face heat up. He pouts down at his lap and rolls the lollipop around his mouth in thought.

“I don’t like it here,” he admits.

He expects some kind of forced comfort, but instead, Minho lets out a low whistle and leans his back against the tunnel. “Let me guess: bullies?”

“They’re not -- I mean, the kids in my class don’t take my money or anything, but they’re mean even though I didn’t do anything to make them hate me,” Seungmin says quietly. “They call me an orphan when I’m not, and say mean things about Old Jung. Hey, do you know if he’s really a creep?”

Minho looks up thoughtfully. He rolls his eyes so far up Seungmin can see the pure white of them. “You shouldn’t listen to what the other kids say. They’re all just stupid and brainwashed by their even stupider parents because they have more money than us. Old Jung isn’t a creep; he’s my friend.”

“ _What_? Really?”

“Mhm.”

"How?"

"He helped me out once." Minho shrugs. "When I needed a place to stay."

Seungmin thinks back to Old Jung with his beer-stained wife beater and malty breath, but he doesn’t pressure his sister into handing the rent on time and always leaves behind some leftover pizza when he orders too much on nights his sister is too tired to cook. His thoughts circle to how Old Jung closes the door quietly and is never loud, especially if he knows Seungmin is home.

Old Jung may have a bit of a hygienic problem, and a huge drinking one, but he’s kind. Seungmin feels bad for not defending his name.

“Anyway, if those kids are giving you a problem, then you should just beat them up.”

“Is that what you do?” Seungmin scoffs, pointing at the bruises on Minho’s face. “You fight?”

“Sure,” is all Minho says, before he’s climbing over Seungmin’s legs and out of the tunnel.

Puzzled, Seungmin rubs away the dredges of tears on his cheeks and follows after him, crawling back out into the glaring sun. Minho grabs his bike that’d fallen onto the wood chips and dusts it off, before he wheels it out of the playground box and onto the smooth pavement. He looks over his shoulder and asks, “Are you coming or not?”

Seungmin stands there, uncertain, the taste of artificial fruit inhabiting his palate as the sun beats down on his back. But Minho stands there too, waiting patiently for an answer despite the bored look he has on his face. His eyes remind Seungmin of a raven’s -- wide, dark, and bright with starlight.

Minho seems like someone who would like the stars.

“Okay,” Seungmin says, and gets on the bike.

He stands on the metal pegs and holds onto Minho’s shoulders tightly before Minho kicks off into motion, pedaling down the road with reckless speed. The dry wind flutters against his skin as they move fast. Summer bugs zip past them and Seungmin looks up at the foliage from the overhanging trees, offering canopies of shade in between bursts of sunbeams. He feels free. He feels happy.

They pass by convenience stores, barber shops and laundromats, comic books and collectible stores, and the retro diner he and his sister visited the day they moved in. Walls of doll-like family houses lessened as Minho took him down a road lined with shrubs of myrtle and feathery cornfields.

Seungmin doesn’t realize that he’s been laughing until the stick of the lollipop almost flies out of his mouth. He is laughing and thinks that all summers should be like this: bike rides and laughter.

At some point, Minho takes him back home when the sun begins to set crimson and gold behind the lilac crags in the hazy distance. He stops right outside of the humble bungalow, wiping sweat off of his forehead with a wrist.

“The ride’s for free this time,” he says, “but you’ll have to start paying after today. I prefer cash, but I also accept candy.”

Seungmin hops off of the bike. “Are we friends now?”

Minho blinks at him, though it’s more of a series of blinks. “What makes you think we’re friends?”

“Well -- ” Seungmin gestures at everything, but then he loses confidence the more Minho blankly stares at him. He deflates and gives up. Making friends is a lot harder than he remembers. “I don’t know. Nevermind.”

That makes Minho snort. “I’ll come find you, dummy.”

Seungmin doesn’t have time to respond when Minho throws him a lazy peace sign and takes off down the street, his clothes billowing behind him like he was about to take flight into the setting sky -- like he was made to never stay in one place.

On this day, Seungmin is ten -- eyes swollen and nose crusted in dried snot. He is ten, heart faintly warm and mouth tasting of oranges, when he makes his first real friend.

✩

Getting to know Minho is like trying to solve a dodecahedron rubik’s cube, all confusing twists and wrong guesses.

The kids at school become more bearable when Seungmin forces himself to imagine they were singing in a tone-deaf voice. So, when he laughs at Minjun for calling Seungmin a street urchin, he gets weird looks and an even weirder reputation. But that’s okay. Seungmin has a friend now.

But said friend seems to have the weirdest reputation out of the two of them, judging by the whispers and scared looks that are sent Seungmin’s way when Minho finds him at school. When Seungmin hops onto the bike and Minho takes them out of the school grounds, he asks him, “Why do people look at you like that?”

Minho shrugs. “I beat kids up.”

“I thought you were kidding.”

“Sure.”

The next time Seungmin sees Minho is by accident. He goes to the playground on a Sunday to spend time by himself on the swings, but then he spots a familiar, agile figure climbing up one of the trees getting smacked in the face by leafy branches. He only realizes it’s Minho when Seungmin notices the telltale red of his bike thrown haphazardly on the ground.

He assumes Minho is just reckless, but then Seungmin follows his gaze up to a stray cat mewling from the top of a thick branch, huddled against the crevice of the tree’s trunk, and wonders if all those scratches on his face and arms were from climbing trees rather than getting into fights.

Seungmin approaches them. He tilts his head back and watches Minho reach for the cat and beckon it forward to his arm. When Minho successfully lures the cat in with a treat he had in his pocket, he tucks the cat into the hood of his jacket that was on backwards, and begins to climb down.

“How come cats get stuck in trees?” Seungmin asks loudly, but realizes it was a mistake when it startles Minho into misstepping. He scrambles for balance but fails, and before Seungmin knows it, he’s breaking Minho’s fall when the latter plummets straight at him and they go down like a pair of bowling pins.

Seungmin is pretty sure he blacks out, or at least, he imagines it, because there’s stars in his vision and his body feels like it’s been steamrolled. He groans as Minho rolls off of him and gently sets the cat down to inspect for injuries before scratching behind its ears. He’s _cooing_ at it while Seungmin is writhing in pain.

“I think my whole body is broken,” Seungmin says miserably.

“Good.”

“I _saved_ you,” Seungmin complains, sitting up. “You’re supposed to say thank you!”

Minho lifts the front leg of the cat and waves its paw at Seungmin. “No thank you.”

“I’m going to step out of the way the next time you fall out of a tree.”

“I wouldn’t have fallen out of it if you didn’t suddenly scare me,” Minho retorts. He’s using a twig with a leaf at the end to play with the cat now, like it was a feather teaser wand. “Cats are built to climb up, not down. You’ll be surprised at how many cats get stuck in trees chasing a squirrel.”

“And you just go around saving them?”

“Sure.”

Seungmin frowns. He tries to reach forward to pet the cat, but it hisses at him and Seungmin retracts his hand like he’d been burned. That earns a high-pitched laugh out of Minho.

“She doesn’t like you,” he sings proudly, scratching the cat behind its ears. “Good girl, good kitty! Hiss at him again.”

“I’m more of a dog person anyway.” Seungmin feels his cheeks heat up at the cat’s rejection. “Dogs are way better.”

“No, cats are.”

“No, dogs!”

“ _Cats_.”

“D-o-g-s! Dogs!”

Minho shrugs, distracted by the cat nudging its cheek against his hand for more scratches. “Whatever you say, Seungmo.”

“It’s Seung _min_.”

“Seungmung,” Minho lilts, and laughs again when Seungmin harrumphs and throws a leaf at him, only for it to be whisked away by the wind.

They end up lounging underneath the sun together, protected by the dappled foliage of the trees, after the cat scurries back to its respective home. Seungmin watches the dried-out clouds drift across the clear, blue sky, and realizes how both of them are neither talkative or cooperative.

Minho gives monosyllabic replies or, if lazy enough, only hums. Seungmin is tight-lipped in his own way and mostly doesn’t have an answer to Minho’s weird conversation starters, like asking if woodpeckers get headaches or which animal flea can jump the highest (who even wonders about those kinds of things? Certainly not Seungmin). The only thing that gets Minho real talkative is if he’s trying to get on Seungmin’s nerves ("Bee Do Bee Do Bee Do," he chimes like a minion right in Seungmin's ear) and much to his dismay, it works.

But as the sun swells in the sky and has them closing their eyes against its glare, Seungmin asks, “Have you ever seen the stars?”

Minho pulls the rubber band off of his wrist and blindly twists it into the shape of a star with his nimble fingers. He holds it up in the air and says, “Now I have.”

“You’re not funny. I meant the real stars.”

“Then no. You can’t see the stars here. Too much pollution.”

Seungmin hums, tapping his fingers against his stomach in thought. “I want to go stargazing one day.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“They’re just dots in the sky. Just shapes and light.”

“But they’re more than just shapes and light,” Seungmin argues quietly. “Don’t you think it’s so cool that we get to see something so far away? Compared to space, we’re just tiny little specks of dust! But that’s the coolest part. We’re alive at the same time as the stars. We’re seeing the _same_ stars as our ancestors saw -- as, I don’t know, Mozart saw!”

Minho slants him an incredulous look. “Are you sure you're younger than me?”

“I just turned eleven a few days ago.”

“Oh. Congrats.”

Seungmin rolls his eyes. “Stars are the coolest. I think everyone needs to see the stars so they know it’s okay to feel small and left behind sometimes.”

Minho is quiet. He’s staring at the rubber band star tangled between his fingers like he’s trying to search for an answer in it. “If the stars won’t help me get out of this place, then they’re useless.”

Seungmin looks over at him, but Minho is rolling onto his side to sit up. The grass where he laid left a bed in his shape. The nape of his neck is mottled with violet fingerprints and Seungmin thinks he understands.

“I’ll help you get out, then,” Seungmin says.

Minho spins around to pin a glare on him. “What?”

“You heard me.” Seungmin sits up and dusts off the grass bits clinging to his shirt. “I’m not gonna say it again.”

He sneers. “What are you gonna do? Sell lemonade? None of the neighborhood kids are gonna help you out. People like them don’t help people like us.”

“People like us?”

“Oh, you know -- “ Minho scoffs, throwing the grass he plucked from the ground onto Seungmin’s knees. “Pitiful. Parentless.”

Seungmin frowns and watches as Minho piles more grass onto him. Woven strands of sunlight get caught in between Minho’s hair that falls above his eyelids, and summer has darkened his skin among the bruises that made him look like a stained glass mosaic. Even though his words are harsh and earnest, he has the appearance of a dream.

Seungmin plucks a daisy from the grass and twirls it around. Minho is older and a little scarier, but Seungmin thinks they have one thing in common out of all their differences, because his own body once looked like a stained glass mosaic too.

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” Seungmin admits, “but I’ll help you whenever you need it, because that’s what friends do, right?"

Minho gives the barest hint of a raised brow. Seungmin feels his face start to heat up at the lack of reaction. Maybe his words sounded more valiant in his head. He doesn’t remember how to act like a friend when his only (obligatory, if he’s being honest) friend back in Seoul was just Choi Soobin crying over his favourite pencils.

But then Minho breathes out a tiny, approved huff, and he’s reaching forward to pluck a leaf out of Seungmin’s hair. His palm brushes against his warm cheek. “Sure, Seungmin. I’ll be counting on you.”

He blinks at Minho smiling at him. He blinks again, and Minho is gone, standing up to go grab his neglected bike. He blinks, and Minho is sitting there, waiting for Seungmin to come over. Always waiting.

Seungmin touches his cheek. It feels like he swallowed a star and it is burning a hole in his chest and spilling gilded light through the cracks. He grins and hurries over to take his usual spot behind Minho on his bike, grasping onto his shoulders.

“Hold on,” Minho says, and he takes off with more vigor than usual.

Minho is hard to understand, but Seungmin thinks he will understand him in due time. For now, they don’t speak, but laugh together towards the sun.

✩

Navigating through the world becomes more fun with Minho in his life.

It’s like solving a puzzle he’ll never understand. Minho finds him in the crawl tunnel every time Seungmin gets into a stupid fight with his sister, and sits beside him in silence that is more comforting than words. And when Minho offers an orange lollipop, Seungmin is filled with hope that things won’t always be this way.

One day, when Seungmin heads to school and is politely greeted by all his classmates, he thinks he might have woken up in another dimension. Nobody teases or taunts him; even Minjun, the principal bully, sports a bruised cheek and leaves him alone for the rest of the day.

It’s eerie and, quite frankly, uncomfortable, but Seungmin is smart. When Minho waits for him by the school gates and Seungmin notices the new, tender bruises on his bandaged knuckles, Seungmin immediately connects the dots with a stutter in his chest.

“Did you threaten my classmates and punch Minjun Lee?” he asks, point blank.

Minho innocently bats his eyelashes. “No.”

“Liar." Seungmin takes Minho’s hands in his and holds them gently like they were a pair of feathers, like they were morning light. He wonders how they can be so soft yet so brutal, but Seungmin supposed that was one of Minho’s many mysteries as an unsung hero with an insoluble polarity. “You’re a big idiot.”

Minho is staring down at their hands. His ears turn suspiciously red. “Whatever.”

Seungmin mentally jots down Minho’s mannerisms to store away in his brain’s newly created folder named _Understanding Lee Minho_. Seungmin learns overtime that when Minho rolls his eyes skyward, he’s either in deep thought or is extremely annoyed. When he’s hyper-focused on something, he blinks ten consecutive times with milliseconds to spare in between. Seungmin knows. He’s counted.

Minho is a portmanteau of the fanciful and the sensible. He talks a lot about useless things but relies on actions. He’ll humour Seungmin with his nerdy spiels and play along, but he’ll remain realistic at the end of the day.

Minho doesn’t give normal answers either. Seungmin once asked him what his favourite colour is and he replied with bubblegum. Seungmin asked which bubblegum. Minho said fresh. Seungmin asked what the fuck does fresh mean. Minho did not elaborate what it means. Minho does not like to make Seungmin’s life easy.

His sister notices the change in Seungmin’s demeanor altogether, because on her rare night off, she makes their mother’s special tofu stew and asks him about the source of such happiness.

“I made a friend,” Seungmin answers simply. “It’s that stupid, mean, ungrateful bug I told you about, noona. He’s weird and acts ugly on purpose sometimes, but he’s actually cool and takes me around on his bike and we catch dragonflies and play hopscotch together.”

“Uh.” She blinks, confused. “You -- you befriended a bug?”

“Not an actual bug! His name is Minho. He’s two grades above me.”

“Oh, thank fucking God.”

After they finish dinner, he helps his sister with the dishes. While he’s drying off the plates, his sister lets out a sigh and pauses in the middle of scrubbing the pan. Seungmin stops too, and studies her exhausted face.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you that I got another job, Minnie,” she murmurs. Her hands are covered in soap suds as she squeezes the sponge. “It’s in the city and they only allow late night shifts. That means you’ll be all alone even when you come back from school.”

Seungmin wants to reach over and smooth out the furrow between her brows, but his hands are dirty, so he stays put. “That’s okay, noona. I know how to take care of myself.”

“I know you do. It’s just -- what if something happens? What if you get hurt and there’s no one around to help you? Old Jung sure as hell won’t hear since he’s always passed out drunk.”

“No one can hurt me if I’m alone,” Seungmin says, poking his pinky finger through the small tear of the towel. “The dead can’t come back alive.”

She looks at him with a start. Her mouth hangs open, but then she closes it and bites her lip. “Yeah,” she whispers, gradually returning to scrubbing the pan. “Yeah, you’re right. He’s gone forever.”

Seungmin thinks he’s said something wrong and waits for his sister to get angry, but she merely hands over the pan for him to dry after she rinses it with hot water, and his shoulders sag in immediate relief. The last time she got angry was right after the funeral: Seungmin had asked his sister why nobody wanted to take them in, and she had backhanded him across the head so hard he almost saw the stars.

“ _It’s not me they didn’t want,” she cried, her knuckles bleeding white, “it’s you.”_

There are times where Seungmin can tell she regrets choosing him. If Seungmin had gotten in the same car as his parents that day, maybe his sister wouldn’t have given up her entire life to look after someone she once couldn’t wait to get away from.

Seungmin shakes his head. He dries off the pan and puts it away. There’s no use thinking about it now. He’s not a dweller -- he can’t be. Not anymore.

His sister’s new job remains undisclosed. She doesn’t tell him much other than vaguely explaining it as a form of entertainment for the public, so he doesn’t think much of it even when she saunters out of her room scantily clad with heavily applied makeup. He does like the sparkles, though.

“You should wear a jacket, noona,” he says, frowning at her small dress. “You’re gonna catch a cold.”

His sister looks so comically touched at his innocent comment that she brings him into her arms. He gets a face full of her bosoms. “You’re a sweet boy, you know that? Please never change.”

Seungmin doesn’t understand girls a lot, so he merely nods and squirms out of her tight embrace to escape her chesticles. He waves goodbye and watches her leave the front door. He lets out a breath and collapses onto the couch, wondering what else he can do to make things easier for his sister before he goes to bed.

Before he knows it, autumn arrives with brimstone trees and crisp leaves crunching beneath his feet. The weather gets colder, so Seungmin layers up in his sweaters since his jacket doesn’t efficiently shield him against the cold. Minho, on the other hand, continues to wear his summer windbreaker, even if the wind nips at his cheeks until they turn pink and the skin of his hands start to crack and bleed.

“Are you sick?” Seungmin asks when he takes a measured look at Minho’s face after school. The poor guy’s got snot dribbling down his red nose and he wouldn’t stop sneezing.

“I’m not sick,” Minho says in a very sickly voice.

“You’re totally sick.”

“Am not.”

“Am too.”

“Am -- “ Minho’s eye twitches and he’s recoiling back for a powerful, full-fledged sneeze. Seungmin squeals and quickly drops to the ground to somersault away before he can capture a faceful of Minho’s germs.

That’s how Seungmin finds himself taking the wheel today. He’s a clumsy bike rider though, and the extra weight behind him doesn’t help with his overall balance. Seungmin half-drags and half-rides themselves over to his house so he can help Minho combat the common cold.

“I dunno if Old Jung allows guests over, but since you two are friends, it should be okay,” Seungmin says, parking the bike outside of their door before jiggling his key into the lock.

Minho takes in an aggressive sniffle and punches the air out of frustration when he still can’t breathe. “I want to tear my fucking nose off.”

“Swear! And I’m not gonna be friends with you anymore if you look like Voldemort.”

Seungmin directs Minho to their couch in the living room and goes to make a cup of honey citron tea for him. His sister had bought enough jars of the tea marmalade to last them three winters before they left Seoul, and though Seungmin rarely gets sick, he can tell the tea will be frequently used now that Minho is ingrained into his life.

Once the kettle starts to shriek, Seungmin hurriedly takes it off the stove and pours the hot water into the cup. He vehemently mixes it together before he brings it over to where Minho currently looks like he was mentally decomposing on the couch.

“Are you hungry?” Seungmin asks.

“I ate rocks,” Minho answers.

Seungmin stares at him. “You mean rock candy, right? _Right_?”

Minho mimics him in a high-pitched, obnoxious voice before he chokes on the tea for being too hot. He desperately sucks in air to cool down his tongue and Seungmin smugly walks away into the kitchen, happy at his demise.

In the meantime, Seungmin tries to heat up some miso soup in the microwave his sister made in the morning before she left for her shift at the supermarket. He brings the bowl over to the living room table and goes to his room to bring out his blanket. He wraps it around Minho’s body until he looks trapped in it like a cocoon begging for clemency.

“Do you wanna admit you’re sick yet?” Seungmin teases.

“No thank you.”

Seungmin rolls his eyes and replaces the empty cup in his hands with the bowl of miso soup. “I don’t have chicken soup to help you, but eat this. I think noona put tofu and seaweed.”

Minho hums, eyeing the soup. “Have you heard what they’ve been spreading about your sister?”

“What?” Seungmin blinks. “What are they saying?”

“That she’s a whore.”

Seungmin bristles. For a split second, he sees red, but then he sees Minho just miserably drinking the miso soup while trying to breathe through his stuffy nose. Seungmin looks down at his curled fist and quickly unwounds it.

He’s heard the word before. He’s heard it be thrown around in school and among his neighbourhood when rich aunties in their neon leggings come jogging past their street. Seungmin just never understood the meaning other than the fact that it’s mean and hurtful.

“Why?” Seungmin frowns down at his lap.

Minho shrugs. “I dunno. It’s just something I overheard.”

“She’s not a whore.”

“I know.”

“She’s cool and hardworking and smart. She’s smarter than _everyone_ else here,” Seungmin continues, and he thinks he’s starting to get sick from Minho’s germs when his nose starts to get stuffy. “She might be mean and angry at me sometimes but that's because she was gonna go to vet school and make a bunch of friends and get a boyfriend and be super happy. If it wasn’t for me, she would already be there right now.”

“Yeah.“ Minho’s voice suddenly goes soft. “I know.”

“But _nobody_ else does,” he counters, and realizes he’s crying -- not sick. “Just like how everybody doesn’t know how you get hurt.”

Minho sighs and leans forward to place the bowl down on the table. He uses the blanket to roughly wipe at Seungmin’s tear-stained face. “You shouldn’t be so sensitive. People are gonna take advantage of that.”

“So what? I know _you_ won’t.”

“How do you know I won’t?”

“You’re too stupid to trick me.”

“I can’t trick someone who doesn’t have a working brain.”

Seungmin uses the edge of the blanket to whack Minho’s head. Minho retaliates by sneezing right in his face and Seungmin yelps. He’s about to run to the bathroom to wash his face when Minho throws himself onto his body to pin him down on the couch. Next thing Seungmin knows, a tickling contest ensues, and Seungmin is laughing and shrieking as Minho runs his fingers down his waist and almost incapacitates him by jabbing his ribs.

When Seungmin finally begs for mercy, Minho relents, but then he flicks Seungmin on the forehead and snickers. “See?”

“See what, you monster.”

“You’re an ugly crier,” Minho says, “but a pretty laugher. So, you should cry less and laugh more.”

Seungmin blinks at him. Something in his stomach topples over. Maybe he really is sick, but he ignores it for now in favour of being a brat. “I’ll cry again just to spite you.”

He shields his face when Minho threatens to knee him in the nose.

After a while of insulting each other, they end up relocating to Seungmin’s room after he recovers relatively fast from his tearful outburst. Holding in all that anger for so long has pre-converted those icky feelings into tears. Seungmin isn’t sure if that’s a good thing.

While Minho deposits himself onto the bed with a tissue box in hand, he listens to Seungmin excitedly talk about his growing book collection to the posters on his walls and to the stars on his ceiling that glows brightly during night time.

"Nerd," Minho says.

Seungmin ignores him and climbs onto his bed to reach his star chart map. “When's your birthday?”

“October 25.”

Seungmin beams and finds the Scorpio constellation relatively fast, and points it out for Minho to see, but then the world tilts on its axis to a slow stop. He stares at Minho with wide, bulging eyes. “Wait. What?”

“It looks like a fishing pole.” Minho squints up at his star sign’s constellation. “Or a lacrosse racket.”

Seungmin rolls out of bed to grab his mini calendar. “Minho, what day is it today?”

“Uh,” Minho drawls, disinterested, “the 25th?”

Seungmin lets out a scream so horrific that it startles Minho into falling over. Seungmin jumps onto Minho and nearly winds him with his elbow when he shakes the older by the shoulders. “You didn’t tell me that it’s your birthday today!”

“I just literally told you,” he wheezes.

“You could have told me earlier,” Seungmin says exasperatedly. “I didn’t even get you a gift. We didn’t even celebrate. And you’re _sick_. This is such a bad birthday. How could you let this happen?”

“It’s just a day where I get a year older,” Minho gripes, swatting Seungmin’s hands away. “There’s nothing to celebrate.”

“A year older means you can have a job soon and make money and get out of here,” Seungmin rationalizes.

“Huh. True.”

Dejected, Seungmin falls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling with a growing pout. He doesn’t mind if Minho doesn’t like birthdays. That’s his life, after all, but he can at least spend it with more mirth instead of staying inside all sick and unhappy.

As if he’s read Seungmin’s thoughts, Minho throws the blanket over him so both of them are covered from the cold. “Don’t be such a dummy,” he mumbles, sounding reluctant -- maybe even shy, if Seungmin focuses hard enough to detect the tone of it. “We’ll have a lot of birthdays to spend together in the future.”

Seungmin snaps his head over to look at him. Minho is hiding his face underneath the blanket, but beneath his tufts of hair was a very red ear. “Really?”

“Duh.”

“But there’s not a lot of birthdays left before you leave.”

“Then follow me.”

His heart stutters to a stop for a moment. “What?”

“You’re not planning on staying here forever, are you?” Minho peeks out from underneath the blanket to gauge him. “You hate this place as much as I do. When you finish high school, come to Seoul with me.”

Seungmin hasn’t thought that far ahead yet. All he can think about is his sister scrubbing the bathroom floor and working long hours only to come back and cry in her bedroom, stifling sobs in hopes it won’t wake Seungmin up when he's already awake.

This life doesn’t belong to him. It's supposed to belong to his sister. He can’t live her life away when he’s just a sentient fragment left behind of a dead thing.

Suddenly, there’s a hand over his mouth, and Minho is looking at him like he ate the moonlight. “Stop crying.”

Seungmin blinks. He touches his cheek but his fingers are dry. “But I’m not.”

“You look like you’re going to.” Minho takes his hand away. He plucks a tissue out of the box and blows his nose into it before he says, “You can say no. It’s not that hard. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

“I don’t want to say no,” Seungmin mutters, fiddling with the threads of his thinned sweater. “But I don’t know what I can do in the future yet. I can’t leave noona behind.”

“Your noona is an adult. By the time you graduate high school, she’ll almost be thirty. You won’t be leaving her behind.”

“. . .I guess so.”

Minho lets out another sigh and pulls at his earlobe. “Alright, let’s not talk about this anymore. Hearing you think so hard is making my head hurt.”

And so, he stitches them a pocket of silence. Seungmin watches the light outside slowly wade into the colour of blackberries when evening arrives. Minho falls asleep at some point, curled up in the blanket with his mouth slightly open to mutter senseless things, and Seungmin listens to his quiet albeit congested breaths -- the rise and fall of his chest, the beating of his heart that ricochets against his own rib cage.

The stars on his ceiling are glowing but Seungmin does not look at them. He looks at Minho who lays beside him like a warm, soft star, and Seungmin closes his eyes, hoping that before Minho leaves, they will continue to make more memories together.

(Seungmin does end up getting sick, but that’s okay. It’s Minho's turn to take care of him anyway.)

✩

As though Seungmin’s basement was an unlocked map in Minho’s limited orbit of locations, Minho comes over more to hang out. In fact, he comes over so much that he practically lives there.

Seungmin learns that Minho is secretly independent -- he knows how to cook the basic dishes that Seungmin fails at, and even makes delicious ramen for dinner one night when his sister is gone for work. They eat across each other at the dinner table and Seungmin wonders if dinnertime has always been so warm.

Seungmin lets Minho sleep over on most nights when Seungmin notices the new bruises that don't look like it came from saving cats in distress. It’s fun to have company on lonely school nights, but Seungmin also realizes how dreary they kind of are.

They're watching a horror movie on his sister's laptop. Critics have reviewed the film to be the scariest of them all, but Seungmin barely bats an eyelash and Minho only yawns for the nth time of the night when the mother on screen beheads herself with a piano wire. When another jumpscare happens, Minho boos at the screen and blows a raspberry.

"We're kind of boring," Seungmin says.

"Not our fault they rely on extreme gore to shock us," Minho scoffs, squinting at the screen. "As if I haven't seen the same scene but in different movies a hundred gazillion times."

"Okay, so we’re boring and totally not normal. Cool."

Minho acts unlike his usual, obnoxious self when he first meets Seungmin’s sister, all shy and docile. Seungmin doesn’t know why until they’re left alone with the apples his sister cut up for them to eat in his starlit bedroom.

“She’s pretty,” he grumbles.

Seungmin’s eyes bulge. “Ew. Do you like her? She’s, like, a total grandma.”

“I just think she’s _pretty_. It’s not like I’m gonna go on my knees and fucking propose to her.”

“Swear!”

Minho shoves him off his bed.

But the most important thing Seungmin does is show Minho his cup of stars. He explains the sentiment, the meaning behind it all, but Minho doesn’t seem to understand the appeal. He thinks it’s childish and weird, so Seungmin puts it away and tries not to feel embarrassed, even if Minho awkwardly retracts his statement to try and make him feel better.

School blurs by uneventfully until it’s winter, then spring, then summer again. It is that summer that Minho finds a bunch of tiny tadpoles in a drying puddle near Old Jung’s driveway. Old Jung informs the both of them that moving amphibians unnaturally between water bodies can spread disease, so Minho wakes up every morning to fill up a large can of water to replenish the puddle and comes by every night to do it again. He even buys dechlorinator drops to ensure that the water is safe for the tiny tadpoles.

Minho continues the routine until the tadpoles grow up into little toads and eventually hop out of the puddle on their own. When that happens, Minho doesn’t stop smiling for the whole day.

Seungmin learns a lot about softness from Minho.

One midsummer day, they’re sunbathing underneath a tree with freezies in their hands when Minho asks, “Do you know why dragonflies have a large ass?”

“No,” Seungmin grumbles as he scratches at the mosquito bites on his neck. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s ‘cause they breathe through their ass and shoot water out of their asshole to make them fly faster,” he explains. “Imagine your bum is both your snorkel and your turbo booster. Damn, wish I could relate.”

“What does that even _mean_.”

“It means we probably shouldn’t catch dragonflies anymore if we don’t want to get a face full of their ass juice.”

Seungmin gags.

They spend every waking minute of the summer together, from making a new home out of the playground’s crawl tunnel to exploring forests on Minho’s bike to playing on the rope swing over a sparkling river; to saving cats stuck in trees and making cardboard shelters for them during summer rain storms; to playing pranks on the neighborhood bullies by flooding their backyard pools with cow fertilizer (after much practiced trespassing, to which Seungmin will not admit to being the mastermind of); and to sharing ice-cream on hot, sweltering days that had them staying inside the basement to keep cool.

Old Jung is nice to lend them an ice tray, but their intentions of making iced tea goes awry when Seungmin plops an ice cube down the back of Minho’s shirt that had him hoo-ing and ha-ing like a hysterical monkey. His joy is fleeting when Minho dumps the entire ice tray down Seungmin’s pants.

His junk has never felt so frozen and numb in his entire life. Seungmin had to lie down on the sizzling sidewalk in order to get some feeling back, all while Minho was cackling like an evil villain in the background.

But summer ends soon enough, and Seungmin dreads the start of high school.

He attends the first day of classes with heightened paranoia and wonders when growing up has sucked so much. He’s forced to interact with his fellow freshmen and he navigates through the crowded halls like a sailor lost at sea, and though he doesn’t get shoved in a locker, Seungmin does get terrorized by a few, big macho tough guys.

At some point through the school year, Seungmin does manage to make a new friend -- a taller, scrawnier Asian boy with beauty marks and a pseudo bowl cut. He’s also new to the suburbs, which means he’s been the limelight of all sorts of hot gossip that Seungmin has inevitably eavesdropped from passing schoolmates, but the guy doesn’t seem to be bothered by it. In fact, he seems thrilled.

“You really have two moms?” Seungmin asks out of curiosity.

Hyunjin puffs up his chest and straightens his back. ”Yeah, what about it? You got a problem with that? You lookin’ for a beat up? I’ve a black belt in taekwondo so I can and _will_ kick your butt!”

It was comical to witness such a poor attempt at being intimidating. Hyunjin may have height, but he surely does not have Minho’s menacing charisma.

“I once read a book about two gay penguins raising a kid together,” Seungmin answers. “I liked it a lot.”

Hyunjin's face immediately lights up at that. He throws an arm around Seungmin and seals their friendship with an enthusiastic hug. Hyunjin is also one of few people in the school who appears to have a functioning brain, so it doesn’t take long for Hyunjin to gain a positive rep -- what with his good looks and good personality -- and all that good rep also gets distributed to Seungmin by association.

He and Minho are sharing a bag of chips by the staircase during lunch when Minho tells him, “Isn’t it kind of funny that the same kids who talked behind your back want to be friends with you now because of that beanpole you hang out with?”

“I doubt they do,” Seungmin snorts. “I don’t have a nice personality like Hyunjin. I’m quiet.”

“Nothing bad about being quiet,” Minho says. “It’s not your problem they’re scared of quiet people.”

Seungmin sees some truth in that. Quiet people can be scary.

"But you're right about not having a nice personality, 'cause you really don't."

Seungmin grabs a handful of chips and drops them all over Minho's lap. "Agreed."

Both of his social worlds merge one day when Hyunjin comes to hang out with them in the alcove beneath their usual staircase. Seungmin darts his eyes between Hyunjin’s nervous face and Minho’s unwavering stare. It’s a little weird. And funny. Seungmin wants to steal Minho's phone to record this.

“Are you the weird sophomore that likes to beat up people?” Hyunjin finally asks.

“He saves cats,” Seungmin pipes in, and ignores the glare Minho sends his way. “And he only beats up people who are mean to me.”

“Whoa. Cool.” Hyunjin beams. “So, like -- you’re like a high school vigilante, but only for Seungmin! That’s kind of romantic.”

Seungmin nods in both approval and agreement, and enjoys the way Minho glows beet red in the shadows.

“I will _kill_ you two,” Minho hisses, all flustered.

“Uh oh,” Seungmin leans over to whisper, “that’s our cue to run.”

Hyunjin blinks cluelessly at him. “Huh?”

Seungmin hops over the railing in time to dodge Minho’s attempt to eviscerate him with familiar ease, and watches Minho snatch Hyunjin by the face and pull at his cheeks like a pair of sticky rice cakes. The staircase becomes inundated in Hyunjin’s cries and pleas for mercy that has other students scurrying away out of fear, and Seungmin laughs ruthlessly at the sight.

Once Minho is done tormenting Hyunjin, the poor lad is left lying on the floor with aching cheeks. But then Minho catches Seungmin’s eye and brings a finger across his throat. _You’re next_.

That only makes Seungmin laugh harder. Minho ends up laughing too, sounding like the spray of the sea, and Seungmin wants them to laugh forever.

When lunch is over and they go their separate ways for class, Hyunjin is rubbing his cheeks to assuage the redness when he speaks in a light voice, “You guys are interesting.”

Seungmin blinks. “What do you mean?”

Hyunjin looks around for pesky busybodies before he leans in close. “You know what they say about him, right? About Minho?”

“Nothing that I don’t already know.”

“Then you should know _I_ was scared of him too -- until today!” Hyunjin declares brightly. “I didn’t think he could laugh like that -- I mean, I didn’t think _you_ could laugh like that too since you're always so quiet -- until I saw you guys together. It’s, like, watching a sitcom but with two of the most tight-lipped people on earth.”

Seungmin frowns and scratches his chest. He’s not sure what to say. He feels a little embarrassed hearing all that. “Oh. Okay.”

Hyunjin pats him on the back and dreamily sighs. “We love to see it.”

“See what?”

Hyunjin ignores him to check his wristwatch. “Oh, man. I should totally get to class right now. I'll see you later, Seungmin!”

Seungmin watches him dash off faster than the speed of light. As soon as he’s gone, Seungmin belatedly mumbles, “We have the same math class together, dumbass.”

Hyunjin’s words continue to niggle at the back of his mind for the remainder of school. Seungmin doesn’t know how outsiders can perceive Minho in such an unflattering light, but then again, they’ve grown up together. They peeve each other into oblivion and disagree more than agree on things, but they were a necessary paradox. A counterbalance. Minho knows Seungmin, and Seungmin knows Minho.

At least, Seungmin knows what Minho decides to be let known.

Curiosity gets the better of him, so after school, when Minho takes them down the winding path of the school vicinity, Seungmin speaks up after a while of quiet riding. “Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

Seungmin ignores him. “Why do you let people think of you that way?”

“What way?”

“Like what they say about you. You don’t correct them or anything. I know you’re not a misfit. I know you don’t launder money or get into fights for fun or kick kittens into the sewers.”

Minho shrugs. “Then that’s enough.”

“What?”

“I only need you to know me,” Minho answers breezily, like he’s talking about the weather. “Why should I waste my time correcting people who would never spend a single hour out of their day to actually get to know me? So, whatever. Let them think whatever they want. I know who I am. What they think of me won’t change that.”

Seungmin blinks. He tries to look at Minho’s face but he’s scared of falling, of being thrown off balance, so he merely tightens his grip around Minho’s shoulders and looks up at the rippling blue tides that belong to the summer sky.

“You’re really cool,” is all Seungmin can say.

Minho hums. “I know.”

Hyunjin gradually becomes integrated into their daily lives. He rides his own bike alongside them after school and doesn't seem to mind their quiet, uneventful routine. He reminds Seungmin of a little clam, happy to ride along with the tide.

But when Hyunjin invites the both of them over to his house engulfed in shrubs of frangipanis located in the much more affluent parts of the suburbs, Minho stays behind outside of the white picket fence.

Seungmin notices immediately because he’s always one step behind him, not in front. He turns around and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t go in,” he says, hands curling into fists by his side.

Seungmin frowns. He glances over his shoulder to find Hyunjin skipping up the steps to the porch. “Are you feeling sick?”

“I just can’t go in.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Because -- “ Seungmin shifts his feet nervously. “Because he has two moms?”

“Not that,” Minho says. “You know it’s not that.”

Seungmin gauges the way Minho tugs at the zipper of his jacket. He examines Minho’s tattered sneakers and old windbreaker, before he looks down at his own hot mess of an outfit. Seungmin lets out a little, benevolent laugh when understanding dawns on him. “You know Hyunjin doesn’t care about that, right? He’s got two lesbian moms, Minho. He’s too busy picking fights with homophobes to give two flying fucks about whether or not we have money.”

“Swear.” Minho folds his arms against his chest and casts his sharp eyes to the side. “Fine.”

It’s funny to see Minho act all stubborn and reluctant, but as soon as he meets Hyunjin’s pretty moms, he’s reduced to nothing but a ruffled mess. He stutters out a meek greeting when one of Hyunjin’s moms -- Irene, Seungmin recalls her name to be -- brings him into a hug. They say nothing about the wounds on his face. They give them peach lemonade and leave the entire living room with all their gaming consoles at their discretion.

Seungmin doesn’t think he’s ever played this much Super Smash Bros in his entire life, but he likes it, because they all laugh together until their stomachs hurt and ribs ache.

“You have to make it less obvious that you like boobs, by the way,” Hyunjin says casually as he reaches forward to tug on Minho’s ears that are still red. “Your face was like a gigantic ripe tomato between my momma’s boobs.”

“She’s just pretty.” Minho smacks Hyunjin’s hands away. “Stop that.”

“But you let Seungmin do it! Why can’t I?”

Minho brings up the hood of his windbreaker to cover his ears and scowls at the television screen. “I’m Kirby this time.”

Seungmin blinks, pausing in the middle of sipping his lemonade. Hyunjin pouts and starts up a new match instead of pestering Minho, but Seungmin isn’t paying attention to the game anymore.

He stares at Minho’s carefully molded expression of indifference, his features smoothed out with practiced ease. Seungmin looks at the pimples on his chin and the acne scars on his cheeks. He looks at the moles he cannot see from this distance but can pinpoint blindly because he knows their placement by heart. Seungmin looks at his favourite, dappled face, and that’s all he can see.

Hyunjin flicks him on the temple. Seungmin tears his gaze away and picks up the controller. There is a warmth in his chest he does not understand.

As they’re heading home after sundown, Minho is quiet. Seungmin watches how the cotton candy sky is whisked away by a deepening, fuchsia hue among the merging clouds. If he squints hard enough, he can see the minuscule gleam of a lonely star.

Seungmin can hear his heart beating. He can hear Minho’s heart beating. He can hear everyone else’s heart beating in the neighborhood -- the sound of human noise and birds breaking small bones against glass and ghosts getting tangled over power lines.

“Minho,” he says without meaning to, and his name wraps itself between his ribs and makes a home in them.

“Hm?”

His cheeks feel windburned. Seungmin doesn’t know what to say and closes his eyes.

“Nevermind.”

Soon enough, they’re outside of Old Jung’s bungalow. Seungmin hops off the bike and waits for Minho to follow, but he’s still seated on the bike with his hands curled tightly around the handles.

“I’m going home tonight,” Minho says. “I need to help my dad run errands tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.” Seungmin bunches up his shoulder to shield himself against a chilly gust of wind. “Will you be okay?”

Minho’s stare turns cold and accusing. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, I -- no. Nothing. Nevermind.”

“Yeah.” Minho looks away, jaw tense. “Nevermind.”

Seungmin watches him go. Goosebumps rise on his arms from the evening wind, the green shrubbery of the neighborhood looking almost black, silhouetted, as if the colour has been drained away. And in the corner of his eye, Seungmin can see the faint apparition of his father staring straight at him from the shadows.

Seungmin blinks, and his father is gone. Minho is gone. The tiny, lonely star is gone.

Maybe Minho is a ghost too: real enough to love, but always out of reach.

✩

Minho doesn’t show up to school the next day.

Or the next.

Seungmin tries not worry, because they're not the type of friends to worry. But he ends up asking Hyunjin about his whereabouts, and even tries to ask Minjun -- who’s dropped off the ranks of the social strata near the start of high school -- after Seungmin successfully corners him in the middle of the hallway to interrogate him, but Minjun effectively avoids Minho as much as he can, and would rather give himself another bruised cheekbone than to spare a single glance at him.

Minho is nowhere to be seen but is everywhere on Seungmin’s mind. His thoughts rapidly circle back to the image of Minho’s stiff hands gripping the handles of his bike. _I need to help my dad run errands._ The stilted tone of his voice, the curl of his lip -- hackles raised and body poised to attack.

Seungmin has seen the same kind of body language from scared animals, but Seungmin can’t wrap his head around the notion of Minho being scared, because Minho isn’t fearful. He _is_ the feared.

With no other options left, Seungmin resorts to Old Jung’s blurry wisdom. He runs up the steps to the front door and knocks. When Old Jung answers the door, his face is ruddy and sallow but his eyes are bright with sobriety.

“What’s up, kid,” he asks gruffly.

Seungmin swallows and stands up straight. “Do you know where Minho lives?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“I can’t find him,” he says, trying to keep his voice clear and steady. “I just need to find him.”

Old Jung stays quiet, but then he lets out a tired sigh and leans against the doorway, but the sudden movement makes Seungmin flinch. Old Jung immediately notices and takes a careful step back to allow extra space between them.

“Alright. I know I’ve got pounds on me, and I look like I can crush you into a tin can, but I don’t hit kids,” he says. “And I ain’t ever will.”

Seungmin eyes him warily. “Drunks always hit people.”

“People? Yeah, no doubt about it when they get shitfaced at a bar, but drunks don’t hit kids,” he replies. “ _Shitty_ people hit kids. Extra points if they’re drunk.”

Seungmin doesn’t see the difference, but his heart feels less uneasy. At least now he can talk to Old Jung without the irrational fear of being hurt by another middle-aged man. But that brings Seungmin to his next thought. “Does Minho’s dad hurt him?”

“Does he? Ha! Been tryna get the kid outta that house for a year already, but the cops here just don’t give a fuck, and that Lee bastard knows how to cover shit up well.” Old Jung runs a hand over his ashy face. Seungmin bites back the urge to chime _swear!_ every time Old Jung lets one out. “That’s why I don’t recommend a kid like you visiting his house. You know where else he can be?”

Seungmin frowns. He looks at the window frosted over like pale fungus, like mothdust, and beyond the foggy film were the silhouettes of towering trees feathered out into the night sky, marked by fluttering wings of ghost finches. He thinks of the motes of white dust, the summer heat, the strands of Minho’s hair that fell upon his eyelids like soft starlight.

Seungmin thinks of summer. He thinks of the playground.

His eyes widen. Seungmin rushes out a quick “thank you!” before he’s running down the stairs, waving blindly behind his shoulder when Old Jung calls after him to be careful. He’s running out of the bungalow and down the streets -- running until his aching ribs dig into his lungs and his heart is leaping through his throat.

He’s got his fingers crossed when he arrives at the playground all out of breath. When he spots the red bike throw on the ground by the box, he instantly sprints towards the crawl tunnel. There’s a figure curled up against the corrugated metal with a large coat -- face hidden by a long toque -- and Seungmin doesn’t think twice when he hurls himself onto Minho.

“Jesus fuck,” Minho curses underneath the weight of him. “Seungmin?”

“You’re _crazy_.” Seungmin digs his face into Minho’s cold neck and wraps his arms around the older tightly. “You’re fucking crazy, you stupid idiot bastard.”

“That’s a lot of swears.”

Seungmin is eaten by a flame of anger for a moment, but he chokes it back down into dust. “Are we not friends anymore?”

There’s a stunned pause. Then, quietly: “Of course we are.”

“Then why didn’t you come to _me_?”

“Can you get off first?”

Seungmin reluctantly complies and lets him go. He mirrors Minho when he sits up, and in the dim glow of the street lamps that shone faintly towards them, Seungmin notices the deep streak of violet running below Minho’s left eye.

He doesn’t know what kind of expression he has on, because Minho sighs and motions at Seungmin’s face, saying, “That’s why. You look like a kicked puppy.”

Seungmin grits his teeth and snatches the sleeve of Minho’s jacket. “So what? Stop caring about me for a moment and start caring about yourself for once.”

“Oh, you’re angry.”

“Of course I am! I said I’ll help you whenever you need it, but I don’t know _when_ if you won't _tell_ me. You never tell me any --“

“No, _no_. Hey, shut up -- just _shut_ up,” Minho snaps, ripping his arm out of Seungmin’s grasp. There is a nasty sneer pulling at his lips. “Don’t say shit like that when you don’t understand a single fucking thing about my life.”

That only makes Seungmin even more angry, because he _does_ understand. He probably understands more than Minho can understand himself. Minho disregards the fragility of his own life so easily that it infuriates Seungmin straight down to his very core, like molten lava spilling through the mantle of the cracked earth. He wants to grab Minho by the shoulders and shake him out of his orbit of distrust -- to bring him out of his own conceited ass and into the reality that is this: he is cared for, he is loved, and he is the star that Seungmin wishes to reach for with his clumsy, inept hands.

But Seungmin doesn’t know how. He is good at speaking but he loses all his words when it comes to Minho. He always does.

So, Seungmin grabs his hands. The gesture startles Minho into looking down when Seungmin intertwines their fingers together. His hands are cold and rough and Seungmin can only hope he is warm enough for the both of them.

“Stay with us until you graduate high school,” Seungmin says.

Minho stares at him. There is blood in the white of his left eye. “What?”

“It’s not like it’s anything new. You practically freeload there anyway,” Seungmin rushes out to elaborate. “It’ll just be more permanent. You can sleep in the living room if you don’t want to sleep in my bed. We can wake up together and go to school together and come back home together.”

“I don’t want your charity,” he says with an underlying tremor in his voice.

“You’re seriously stupid if you think it’s charity. I live in a _dump_. If Hyunjin asked you to live with him, then _that’d_ be charity. Noona can use the extra pair of hands to clean the bathroom and kitchen anyway. Maybe she’ll even pay you -- who knows. Just live with me.”

Minho stays quiet, like this was a fatal decision he needed to ruminate for a long, long time when it was as simple as yes or no. Seungmin rubs Minho’s fingers between his hands until they’re warm and kisses them.

Something mangled escapes Minho’s throat. Seungmin can’t see much of his face in the barely lit tunnel, but he knows by now that Minho’s ears must be redder than a cardinal. And then, after what feels like an eternity, Minho lets out a sigh. His whole body exhales with him.

“Okay,” Minho says quietly. “Okay.”

Seungmin blinks at him. He tries to smother down the smile he can feel tugging at his lips, but Minho is huffing at his poor attempt to hide it, and Seungmin ends up laughing softly into his hands.

Yeah. Okay.

When they get home, Old Jung shakes his head at the sight of Minho’s black eye, and lends Seungmin his tin of tiger balm that smells of eucalyptus. It is the same exact medicinal balm his mother used to put on his mosaic skin.

Seungmin boils an egg and wraps it in a towel. He presses it gently against the bruised skin beneath Minho’s eye, and jumps back when Minho lets out a harsh hiss.

“Aren’t you supposed to use ice?” Minho vehemently kicks his feet into the air to express his pain.

“We don’t have ice.”

“Shit.”

“Swear,” Seungmin lilts quietly and puts the egg back onto Minho’s black eye.

Later that night, his room smells like tiger balm, all medicinal and stinging. They lay beside each other on Seungmin’s bed and look up at the fluorescent stars on his ceiling. They don’t talk. Minho rests his head on Seungmin’s shoulder and falls asleep. Time stops existing.

Seungmin listens to his quiet breaths and does not sleep. Instead, Seungmin thinks about erosion. He thinks about Jupiter’s cloud motions. He thinks about the real stars in the real sky and the star on his shoulder.

Seungmin swallows all the words he couldn’t say and hopes the hand he gently places on Minho’s chest is enough to convey them.

✩

Minho goes back to school with concealer a shade too pale for his face.

Seungmin’s sister was more than happy to let Minho stay with them and play makeup artist to cover Minho’s bruised eye, but she seems to have forgotten that their skin complexions are completely different. It doesn’t stop her though.

“Don’t I look like Zuko?” Minho asks with a hint of pride.

“No,” Seungmin says flatly. “You look Zu- _pid_.”

Hyunjin, on the other hand, is so nettled by the wrong shade that he personally knights himself as Minho’s temporary make-up artist and drags him around the mall in the city to pick out the correct concealer and foundation that matches his complexion. Needless to say, Hyunjin has the time of his life beating Minho’s face up -- with a cushion, of course.

“How come he put the stuff on your neck too?” Seungmin surveys the seamless blending with a frown.

“I dunno. He said it’s weird if my face looks brighter than my neck.”

“But he covered your moles,” Seungmin says. “Your moles are pretty and shouldn’t be covered.”

“Bring that to Hyunjin's attention, not _me_ ,” Minho retorts, pushing Seungmin’s face away from his neck. He’s turning around and Seungmin can see the shell of his ear glow red.

Soon enough, the deep violet of the bruise wanes into a murky blue-green until there’s but a watercolour remnant of a fading yellow. Minho becomes happier living with Seungmin and his sister, and he supposes the free bike rides to school is also worth the terrorization he tolerates at home now too.

Old Jung doesn't mind the extra tenant. He helps buy extra necessities for Minho and checks up on him frequently, and even teaches him how to drive. Seungmin has the utmost honour of watching Minho give up after 5 minutes of learning the PRINDL.

When summer ends, Seungmin can feel childhood ending too. Growing up comes with growing pains, and he doesn’t like it at all.

Puberty is weird. He’s gotten the Talk™ before (his sister was sweating bullets when trying to explain the intricacies of fornication, and Minho wasn’t very helpful when he demonstrated the entire process with his hands while dubbing it as the ‘peepee cheat sheet’) but when he starts growing hair down _there_ , he starts to panic a little.

“Are my balls supposed to be so hairy?” he asks. He watches Minho spit out his water and trip over his own two feet that has him face-planting onto the ground. “Okay, I’ll take that as a yes.”

Since everyone was hit by waves of hormonal imbalances, Seungmin gets a lot more crude comments about his sister made by sleazy bullies. Seungmin learns to defend her name with practiced eloquence, but when they suddenly scatter like scared mice, Seungmin looks behind him to find Minho listlessly picking at his ear.

"Did you do something?"

Minho blinks innocently. (He was not innocent.) "No."

But there's an even bigger contender to what really takes the cake of being The Worst Thing About Growing Up: _acne_.

He’s got a face and nape full of it. Though Seungmin has mastered the art of self-restraint from years of getting bit in the face by mosquitoes, he can’t help but pick at them. They’re just so big and bumpy and tender that it frustrates him down to the gristle and bones. He wants to scratch his entire face off so he can grow a new sheet of skin.

Hyunjin, unfairly blessed by the gods (and money), offers a skincare tutorial. Seungmin doesn’t think Hyunjin’s proclivity for the dramatics would extend to miscellaneous topics until Seungmin is forced into the computer lab during lunch time to sit and watch him pull up a powerpoint presentation.

“I recommend using a salicylic acid cleanser to gently exfoliate the skin and reduce acne, followed up by hyaluronic acid to maintain your moisture barrier, then maybe a niacinamide serum to reduce the appearance of acne and congestion -- topped off with a super hydrating moisturizer to keep all the goodies in. Your acne isn’t that bad, so if you’re more interested in spot treatment, you can also try to get a benzoyl peroxide cream to put on your pimples to kill the bacteria underneath the skin. Clear skin takes love and patience, Seungmin! Time, time, time!”

Seungmin stares at him slapping the screen with a pointer. He has retained absolutely nothing. “Um. What's saline cycle acid?”

One of the nice things is that he grows tall -- not as tall as Hyunjin, of course -- but he’s taller than Minho by at least an inch now, and Seungmin uses that as ammunition to make fun of him. Such examples include:

  1. “You need to clear up your storage for a height update.”
  2. “Okay, tiny oxygen thief.”
  3. “You’re smaller than a shrimp and wise as the world is flat.”
  4. “Minho- _hyung_! Expired brain cells are not cute for your vertically challenged body!”



Needless to say, Minho becomes very vindictive, and decides to turn every hug into a near-death experience by choke holding him, but somebody has to annoy Minho and that somebody just so happens to be Seungmin.

And sometimes Hyunjin, when he’s feeling extra suicidal.

“Yooo, are we calling him hyung now? Are we using that now?” Hyunjin bounces after Minho excitedly and chants, “Minho-hyung! Minho-hyung!”

“Lee Minho,” Seungmin tries, and dodges a sharp whack to his ass. “Lee Minho- _hyung_?”

Minho covers his ears and languishes, “Kill me right fucking now.”

Seungmin shouts, “Swear!”

They continue to follow after him like puppies. It was a fun day.

Other than the physical aspects of growing up, Seungmin thinks he’s matured on the inside too. He doesn’t cry as much anymore because he’s mature and smart and he doesn’t want to be seen as sensitive, but then he watches Hyunjin blubber at every sad movie he has the misfortune of watching, and wonders what it’s like to feel so freely.

There is too much judgement in the suburbs. One, tiny prick to his finger and Seungmin is scared his anger will no longer be reduced to tears but to something more -- something like shards, open flesh, carnage. Something too much.

He tries hard not to think about it.

When Minho turns old enough, he gets a job. With his handy red bike, impressive hand-eye coordination, and an early bird regime, he works as a paper courier. Seungmin isn’t surprised he chose that type of job, especially with the lack of customer service and stilted interactions it entailed.

Minho has it all planned out. He earns $390 every week, so that accumulates to at least $1,587 per month. If he keeps that up for another year, he’ll have enough saved to apply for university and buy what he needs to move across the continent. Then, once he manages to escape the suburbs and gets accepted into one of the many universities in Seoul, he’ll apply for a student loan program, find an apartment dweller looking for a roommate, and start his own life.

No more suburban busybodies, no more homesickness, no more basing his worth on wealth, and no more heavy fingers splattering violet against open flesh.

Seungmin looks at the starlight in his eyes and realizes that _this_ is his dream. Dread churns in the base of Seungmin’s gut and he isn’t sure why, but he ignores it in favour of high-fiving Minho and telling him he believes in him.

“Time flies, you know,” Minho says one day after school, when they decide to walk home instead of using the bike. “Do you know what you want to do when you graduate?”

Seungmin hums. He looks up at the feather pink sky dappled by cirrus clouds. “Not really.”

“Thought you liked the stars enough to go up there and be with them.”

Seungmin scoffs. “I’ve never thought of being an astronaut.”

“What do you think of being, then.”

Seungmin still hasn’t thought that far ahead yet. His mind is still here, content with the quiet things, the soft times, the gentle moments -- satiated by the little pieces of time in the present. The future suggests change and Seungmin is used to change. He can adapt to it seamlessly, but he doesn’t know what awaits for him in a life that doesn’t belong to him. He doesn’t know if he can even keep it.

Everyone will pass, and everything will become a blur. Memories will disintegrate. Seungmin can feel Minho’s eyes on the side of his face, and wonders what it’s like to know one’s life so confidently.

“You think so loud,” Minho says, flicking him on the forehead. “You don’t need to think so much, sometimes.”

Seungmin blinks. Minho walks ahead of him and Seungmin watches the frame of his strong back slowly recede from his reach, like always.

He tries hard not to think about it.

On his sister’s 24th birthday, he and Minho try to bake a cake to collectively show her their appreciation, but then it comes out of the oven burnt to crisps that sets off the fire alarms, earning them a lecture from Old Jung who advised them to never touch the oven ever again. So, they decide to skip school (much to Seungmin’s discomfort) and take the bus all the way to the city to buy his sister’s favourite fruit cake from an Asian bakery.

As they’re walking past the busy streets of downtown to return to the bus stop, something blue behind the glint of a window catches Seungmin’s eye. He slows down to a stop beneath the boutique’s awning and stares up at a mannequin wearing a pale blue sweater with a tiny crescent moon embroidered at the left breast. It looks soft and comfy. It looks expensive.

Minho sidles up to him. “Get it.”

“I literally have five cents in my pocket. _You_ have a dollar.”

“This is where our bad personalities come in handy,” Minho whispers in a conspiratorial voice, pointing at the red-lipped employee standing behind the till. “Ever haggled?”

“We’re supposed to haggle at the fish market, not for designer _sweaters_ , you stupid hyung.”

Minho brings an eyelid down and sticks out his tongue.

They wait at the crosswalk. Seungmin keeps a wary eye out for any teachers off duty, but then he notices Minho’s attention diverted elsewhere. Seungmin follows his gaze and realizes that he’s still looking at the exorbitantly priced sweater.

“It’s fine,” Seungmin reassures, waving a hand in front of him. “I’m pretty sure I can find a dupe in a thrift store.”

Minho purses his lips and says nothing. He walks ahead with the box of cake when the pedestrian light turns on.

Determined to stay up late to wait for Seungmin’s sister to come back home, they waste the evening away by doing homework. Hyunjin comes by after school to hand Seungmin the notes he missed, and flusters him. “So, you guys missed school just to go on a date? Without _me_?”

“It wasn’t a date,” Seungmin grumbles, face heating up. “It was an errand.”

“Okay. So a date -- _ow_!”

Seungmin finishes his review of the notes relatively fast, but then he peeks over Minho’s shoulder to watch him solve thirty quadratic equations from his math textbook in less than ten minutes. Dubious, Seungmin checks the answers in the back and realizes that all of Minho’s answers are correct.

“What the fuck.”

“Swear,” Minho intones, boredly scribbling out his English essay on loose leaf paper.

“I thought you said you sucked at school.” Seungmin narrows his eyes. “Did you lie?”

“Depends on how you define lying.”

“Lying is when you’re not telling the truth.”

Minho smugly points at him with his pencil. “Lying is inclining your body in a horizontal position.”

Seungmin uses the textbook to bonk him on the head.

They start to nod off around midnight, but as soon as the clock strikes three and Seungmin hears the door begin to jiggle open, he slaps Minho awake and runs to the fridge to take out the birthday cake. When the door opens, the both of them pull the confetti party poppers and yell congratulations at his sister, but the sudden noise startles her so much she lets out a litany of curses that has Minho covering Seungmin’s ears.

“You two are supposed to be asleep,” she gently chastises, locking the door behind her. “You didn’t have to stay up late for this.”

“But it’s your birthday,” Seungmin counters, dragging her to the kitchen table. He seats her down in the middle and brandishes the knife for her to take. “We bought the cake you like -- the one with cherries and cream in the middle and a bunch of black chocolate on the outside.” Then, he points at the bar of chocolate frosted with cursive writing. “They spelled your name wrong, though.”

She laughs and brings them both into a hug.

They eat the cake together. Seungmin is happy to see the warm glow on his sister’s face that is usually dimmed with exhaustion. After Minho finally excuses himself to get ready for bed, Seungmin helps his sister pile up all the dishes to the sink and they wash in silence. Once they’re done cleaning, Seungmin manages to convince his sister to wait at the table before he quickly potters into his room to grab his gift.

It’s not the most impressive thing in the world. Seungmin had taken a piece of cardboard and cut it out into the shape of a ribbon medal before he painted it as realistically as he could during art class. But he hopes it’s enough to convey his gratitude, when the words he has boldly written in the center of the medal reads: _#1 Best Sister In The WWW (Whole Wide World)._

His sister doesn’t react at first. She sits there with her face covered by curtains of stringy hair. Seungmin thinks she must be cold in nothing but her sequin dress when he notices her shoulders shaking, but then she gathers him into her arms and lets out a faint, stifled sob. He wonders if he’s done something wrong again.

“Sorry,” Seungmin murmurs into her shoulder.

“Why?” she laughs wetly. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, silly. I’m happy. These are happy tears.”

Seungmin swallows. Hearing his sister cry brings an itch to his nose. “Because I’m me.”

"No, _no_ , that's not -- " she’s shaking her head and pressing her lips to the top of his head. “Why do you say that? Why are you sorry when I’m the one who should be?”

Words feel tight in his mouth. He looks at the clock and imagines time undone. He sees it, then: the vibrant green of the grass as he and his sister played catch outside in the sun, neither of them yet aware of the existence of grief as their mother watched them from afar; the roughhousing and name calling and laughter that filled their stomachs like black forest cake. The afterimage of their early childhood lingers like fruit flies over spoiled fruits.

“I think mom would be proud of you,” Seungmin says quietly. His sister cries harder and he is the one who holds her this time.

After he helps her to bed, Seungmin shuts off all the lights and goes to diligently brush his teeth and wash his face. Then, when he climbs into bed, he stares up at the ceiling wide awake.

Minho is facing the wall. Seungmin assumes he’s already asleep until he hears him mutter, “Told you she’d like it.”

His chest feels light. Seungmin smiles and closes his eyes.

✩

Seungmin’s own birthday is uneventful -- just as he likes it.

Hyunjin excitedly suggests a birthday bash, but Seungmin grabs him by the collar and threatens to sneak into his house and replace his shampoo with shaving cream so he gets out of the shower all hairless like a naked mole rat if he even _dares_ to think about throwing a party.

It works, because Hyunjin slinks away from his locker with his hands brought up to protect his hair. Minho looks on with mild interest before he offers Seungmin a high-five.

Seungmin invites Hyunjin over for dinner, though, as well as Old Jung -- who stays sober the whole day. His sister has taken the day off to prepare the home cooked meals Seungmin hasn’t eaten for years. Birthdays are starting to become his favourite days when Seungmin realizes he gets to gather up all his favourite people together in the same room and spend time with them.

When the night is done and everyone else has retreated home, Seungmin doesn’t have the chance to change into his pajamas when Minho throws his jacket at his head.

“What -- “

“Come with me,” Minho says. He’s leaving for the door before Seungmin can even ask what was going on.

Seungmin follows after him, but when he sees that Minho is getting into Old Jung’s rusty starlet with chips of paint falling off at the sides from the talon-like scratches, he grows incredulous. He opens the door to the passenger seat and asks, “You’re _driving_?”

“I know how to drive. He gave me permission to use his car, and your sister knows so you don’t have to worry about it,” Minho answers smoothly, blindly poking the keys into the engine. “Sit.”

“The last time you drove, you crashed into a landline.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No I didn’t.”

Seungmin crosses his arms. “I don’t want to get arrested.”

“You are so annoying,” Minho gripes. The engine sputters to life and he levels Seungmin an unamused glare. “Can you get in already?”

Seungmin sighs. He settles into the passenger seat and prays for his life.

The ride to the mystery location is silent, aside from the old rock songs playing quietly from the radio. Three pine air fresheners hang from the rear mirror. Zelkova trees blur in the rush, their silhouettes carved by the moonlight. Minho doesn’t say where he’s taking him, but Seungmin knows they’re heading into the city as he drives under the overpass. Seungmin fogs up the window with his breath and draws a little star.

Lulled to sleep by Minho’s quiet humming, Seungmin doesn’t realize he’s dozed off until he’s being shaken awake. When he opens his bleary eyes, he finds themselves at the beach. Seungmin blinks. He looks at Minho in question, but he’s already getting out of the car.

“What are we doing here?” Seungmin asks, watching as Minho takes a rolled-up quilt out of the trunk of the car.

“Do me a favour and shut up for a minute,” Minho retorts. “And keep your eyes closed until I say so.”

Seungmin knits his brows together but does as he’s told. Minho gingerly takes him by the hand and leads him down to the primrose sand, crushing the marram grass beneath their shoes.

They walk a good distance across the beach. Minho stays far from the driftwood shore and lacy tides, and seems to be mulling over the perfect spot before he lets go of Seungmin’s hand. Seungmin can hear him unwinding the quilt and flattening it down over the sand. Then, he’s maneuvering Seungmin around to lay down on it, though it’s more like a shove to the ground rather than a gentle assistance.

“Can I look yet?” he asks impatiently.

“Wait.” There’s the sounds of rustling. He can feel Minho settle down beside him. “Okay, now.”

Seungmin opens his eyes. At first, all he sees is the bright, blue glimmer of the oceanscape, the waves breaking at the shore and receding just as quietly as it flowed. But then his eyes flicker upwards out of instinct, and what he sees paralyzes him into a breathless silence.

Stars.

They’re clear and glittering in the sky, sequin-silver light scattered across the void like pulses of angel fire. Overhead, the moon hangs like a great, hunter's horn, reflected against the ocean and shards of sea glass.

Seungmin sees them, feels them through the vertigo, tastes the death of them in the back of his throat -- but they’re alive in quiet destruction, unmoving and bright.

“Happy birthday.”

Seungmin tears his gaze away from the sky to look at Minho, but the words die at the tip of his tongue.

Minho sits there, the outline of his figure illuminated by the shadows of the fragmented moonlight casting a dreamlike glow across his face. He sits there, constellated, in star-like silence. He sits there, looking at Seungmin with a faint smile ghosting his lips and his eyes curved into the shape of starlight.

Unwittingly, a soft, warm feeling fizzes up in his chest, like soda in a shaken can. It moves upwards through his throat, into his cheeks, his temples, until it feels like he’s bubbling over.

Seungmin is sixteen, with a hummingbird heartbeat, when he realizes that this is a crush.

“Beats your cup of stars, doesn’t it,” Minho says. He is looking up at the sky but Seungmin is looking at him. “Took me forever to find a place like this. So, go on. Test your knowledge with the real thing.”

Seungmin swallows loudly. His face burns and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, but he composes himself enough to pretend he’s fine. He points up at a bowl-like shape with a handle and says, “That’s the Big Dipper.”

“What the fuck.”

“ _Swear_.”

They lay there together underneath the stars as Seungmin points out discernable constellations while Minho complains about only seeing a bunch of dots. Seungmin doesn’t keep track of how long they stay there, but he talks for a long, long time until Minho lets out a big yawn and decides that it’s time to head home before it can get any later.

They get up from the sand. Minho dusts off the quilt and rolls it up. There is an ache in Seungmin’s chest, the heart of a hummingbird replaced by the heart of a rabbit, and he wants to lift up a hand to reach forward and touch him. Just a touch, to know that he’s real.

“Thank you,” Seungmin says.

But Seungmin has always loved the stars since he was a kid -- those specks of unreachable light that he couldn’t see up close, touch, or feel. So, maybe it’s natural, or some twisted fate, that he is attracted to the most distant and inaccessible light that is Lee Minho.

“You’re welcome.” Minho smiles.

Seungmin pockets his hands.

✩

It only hits Seungmin later on that he’s not supposed to crush on a boy.

The topic of crushes comes up one day as they’re walking home after school. Hyunjin has his arms around Seungmin and Minho as they trek down the sidewalk covered in riot-coloured leaves.

“So then, she just takes me by face and plants it on me -- like, right here, guys, on my _mouth_ ,” Hyunjin relays the story for the nth time. “My first kiss! So, yeah. I think we’re in love now.”

Minho looks completely unimpressed. “You’re not in love. You’re just stupid.”

“How do _you_ know?” Hyunjin scoffs. “Have you ever been in love?”

“No.”

“Exactly! Actually, are you even capable of love?” Hyunjin squints. “What do you even look for in a girl?”

“I look away.”

“The hell does that even mean?”

Minho remains tight-lipped. He gets away with his silence when he lifts a threatening fist and Hyunjin balks at the prospect of getting roughened up. So, he relegates the spotlight onto Seungmin, who’s been staring at the ground lost in his own thoughts -- lost in the whirl of apprehension dredged up from his stomach.

“How about you, Seungmin? Anyone tickle your pink yet?” Hyunjin nudges his cheek against his head as if it could draw an answer out of him. “Who’s the lucky gal?”

Seungmin has never felt that way about a girl before, or anyone for that matter, in his whole life. He always thought that maybe love had been beaten out of him, but then things changed after that summer. Now, the only person he can ever feel this kind of way is with --

Seungmin looks up at Minho to find him looking back. He thinks about just how scary the light is.

“Nobody,” Seungmin answers, pushing Hyunjin’s face away.

“Oh, come on! You guys are so boring!”

After Hyunjin takes his leave down the route to his neighborhood, the walk back to Seungmin’s place is peacefully quiet. They knock elbows until they’re trying to land hits in each other’s ribs. Seungmin laughs, but then he snuffs it down quickly, because he’s scared he laughs too much around Minho.

“Hyunjin just lacks a certain kind of filter, so you shouldn’t let what he says bother you,” Minho says as he walks ahead. Seungmin tries his best to keep up with him.

“What?”

“His whole spiel just then.” Minho doesn’t look back. “It doesn’t have to be a girl.”

Seungmin realizes what Minho is trying to say and his steps falter behind him. “I’m not -- I don’t -- I never -- “

“I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be a girl and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Seungmin purses his lips and feels his head spin just a bit, but then Minho is turning around to look at him, and the color of his eyes takes up all of Seungmin’s mind until it’s just a swathe of him.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl he crushes on -- all Seungmin knows, after today, is that he was not supposed to crush on his best friend.

✩

Days turn into weeks turn into months. Seungmin had gathered up all his fizzling feelings and locked them into a box, and it worked for a long time, because he did a good job pretending to be himself. But now, as he watches Minho move around the room like a piece of torn silk packing up his bags, Seungmin isn’t sure if that box is large enough to contain his heart anymore.

Minho won three scholarships from outstanding grades. During the ceremony, Seungmin watched him walk across the stage with a surge of warmth in his chest that didn’t mix well with the dread in his gut, but he joined in with Hyunjin when he was cheering and shouting his name to the point that his sister had to pull at their ears to shut them up.

But when Seungmin caught the wide, long-suffering smile on Minho’s face that made his eyes crinkle, Seungmin thought it was worth the splintering ache and violent longing to have seen that.

“Are you excited?” Seungmin asks as he lingers by the closed door, fiddling with the long sleeves of his light sweater.

“Sure,” Minho replies, shoving a t-shirt into his duffel bag. “Not really about the plane ride, but getting outta here -- yeah.”

Seungmin hears Old Jung outside calling for Minho to hurry up. Minho sighs and scrunches up a pair of shorts to fit into the bag. He mutters to himself about what else he needs, why his bag had an odd bump in the middle, and wonders if he’s missing anything. He’s fluttering about the room like an indecisive house fly.

There is a silence in Seungmin’s head, filling up the canals with cotton. He closes his eyes and sees a cliff swallowed by a bottomless darkness, but the stars are clear above his head and the cicadas grow in swarming harmony. Seungmin is an exposed nerve when he jumps off.

“I love you.”

Minho stops in the middle of pacing around. He blinks down at the pair of socks he found underneath the bed. He doesn’t move, but then he’s suddenly frowning, like those three words were the worst thing he’s ever heard.

“I love you too,” Minho says quietly after a prolonged silence, but he sounds awkward -- like he’s never said those words before. “You know I do even if I don’t say it, right? You were my first real friend.”

Seungmin can't help but laugh. Minho doesn’t know that he meant it as a confession, not as a compliment.

“Yeah.” He hopes his voice doesn’t betray him. “I know.”

Old Jung drives them to the airport. He parks outside of the drop-off zone for departing flights and pats Minho on the head. Seungmin gets out of the car so they can speak privately for a bit.

Seungmin helps Minho take his luggage out of the trunk. Despite their years of friendship -- of sharing the bed as little kids and plucking clementine peels out of their hair and chasing sunsets on a red, beat-up bike -- they don’t hug, because they’re not the kind of friends to do that. Instead, Minho looks at Seungmin like the sun is inside of him and places a hand on his chest.

“See you later,” he says. “Crybaby.”

Minho is walking away from him. His back begins to grow small and Seungmin opens his mouth to shout his full name.

It draws the attention of strangers but Seungmin tries to ignore them like the burn on his face. Minho stops and turns around in surprise, because he knows it’s unlike Seungmin to have done that.

But Seungmin doesn’t care. His heart is pounding like the foam racing over the beach when he yells, “I’ll miss you!”

And then he quickly gets back into the car. Seungmin ducks his head and hides under the window until Old Jung pulls away from the curb and takes them back to the highway.

The sun burns high in the sky. It is warm and humid but Seungmin tries to fog the window up with his breath anyway. He draws a star. It doesn’t stick.

✩

They do a good job keeping in touch at first.

It’s always the first year that’s somewhat steady. Arbitrary texts here and there and long-distance phone calls with Minho falling asleep on the other line since it’s always late in Seoul when it’s only midday in the suburbs. Seungmin doesn’t hang up though. He listens to Minho’s breathing and pretends he’s right next to him when he feels scared of growing old all alone.

Seungmin learns a lot about Minho’s roommate via complaints: Seo Changbin, a music student who’s only a year younger than him and shares the same polarity with his cold appearance but warm and playful personality. Then, Minho talks about university -- about the interests he’s exploring that he never got the chance to do in the suburbs, and the job he has that pays well enough to keep a roof over his head.

“I’m talking to someone,” Minho admits. “To get better, I mean.”

Seungmin closes his eyes. He is farther away and farther out of reach. “I’m glad, hyung.”

During a heat wave in the summer, Seungmin stays inside the basement. He repeatedly throws a ball at his door and catches it to waste time until Minho calls.

“Noona got a new job, by the way,” Seungmin says, clutching his phone in between his ear and shoulder as he’s multitasking. He’s trying to make iced tea, but the ice cubes won’t leave their little slots in the plastic tray, so he ends up smashing it against the counter to loosen them. “She got scouted by a model agency when she went out to buy groceries, so she doesn’t work at the club anymore. She’s really happy now, and I think at this rate, we’ll be able to move out of Old Jung’s and into a nicer place. Maybe into another city."

Seungmin waits for Minho’s reaction, but frowns when he receives no reply. Suddenly, he hears a snore and a few sleepy curses. Seungmin’s heart feels cold like damp metal and he says goodnight to a dead man.

Minho’s absence is stark, like a bloodstain on pale skin, as Seungmin navigates his last year of high school. But being burdened with extracurricular activities and post-secondary applications take up most of his time, so he ends up forgetting to call Minho too.

“He seems like the type to suck at keeping touch,” Hyunjin says as they’re leaving the movie theatre together. He’s piling the rest of the buttery popcorn into his mouth. “No offence to Minho hyung, but he literally took fifteen and a half days just to tell me _no_ when I asked if he wanted to buy girl scout cookies. And yes, I counted, because it pissed me the hell off.”

“It’s not like we have to talk everyday.” Seungmin watches his breaths take shape in a cloud whiter than the snow. “He’s busy and happy now. He’ll call when he has the time.”

“Okay, but dude. You look like some yearning maiden waiting for her husband to come sailing back from his long-due journey -- like you’re Penelope and he’s Odysseus.”

Seungmin grabs a handful of popcorn and shoves it down Hyunjin’s sweater that has the latter wailing. “Say some weird shit like that again and I’m revoking all our friendship rights.”

“You are way too cute to act like that, man!”

But at least Seungmin has Hyunjin. They grow closer as friends and Hyunjin -- daft as he appears to be -- brings up a good point one night, when Seungmin is sleeping over at his house on a three-day weekend.

“You’ve only had him for a long time,” he murmurs sleepily, snuggling close to Seungmin’s side. A real cuddlebug the guy was, despite often denying it. “And now that he’s gone, of course you’re sad and not used to his absence, but you know what they say, right? Distance makes the heart grow fonder.”

“I hate that saying so much,” Seungmin intones, staring up at the starless ceiling. “It fills me with such unbridled rage that I want to punch something into unrecognizable pieces.”

Hyunjin groans and quickly rolls away from him.

But the lonely, quiet year goes on, and it is that year that Seungmin realizes that without Minho by his side to distract him, to help him bury truncated ghosts, Seungmin is just a coward. 

He tries to remain unaffected when Minho starts to miss calls and delay replies. He climbs the trees in place of him to save the cats stuck up there, even if he nearly breaks his leg from falling out of one after he gets scratched in the face. He spends most of his summer alone in the crawl tunnel, wondering why the ghost of his father lingers in his periphery. He rides the red bike Minho left behind around the suburbs and ignores the taunts from the other boys when they realize Seungmin is a wound for them to pry open without Minho’s armour.

Seungmin is followed by them, one day, when he’s heading to the playground. They haul him off the bike and smash the extension of Minho’s heart into a mangled clump of metal and rubber.

“Your _boyfriend’s_ not here to protect you now,” one of them sneers. “What? Not gonna say anything? Cat got your tongue?”

“Or a dick,” someone goads, “since he’s not into pussy.”

Seungmin closes his eyes. He thinks about the nonexistent constellation he cartographed from Minho’s moles, but the image is cut through by the grave faces of his uncles looking at him with pity at the funeral while his aunts whispered behind their black fascinators; then, Seungmin sees his mother cradling his face in her warm hands, pressing her lips to his forehead and smelling of salonpas and juniper; then, there’s his sister, ripping apart her acceptance letter as she damns him to hell for being alive.

He jumps from scene to scene in his tangible landscape of memory, but then he’s gasping awake and opening his eyes to a vermillion sky. The bullies are gone and the earth is bleeding above him. His ribs ache and he wishes it was the ache of laughter instead.

Seungmin leaves the broken bike behind and limps home.

“This feels familiar,” Seungmin says as his sister rubs woodlock oil over the bruises on his ribs, trying to lighten up the mood after she spent an hour cussing at the neighbourhood. “They’re pretty weak compared to dad.”

She jolts. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s just an observation.”

" _Seungmin_."

"What?"

“Why didn’t you fight back?”

“And what?” Seungmin thinks they’ve beaten the filter out of him, because he can’t stop speaking. “Be like him? If I turn into the man you and mom never bothered to stop, would it be easier for you to finally admit that you hate me, then?”

She stares at him, a tremble to the line of her jaw. Seungmin stitches his mouth shut and looks away from the ghost in her eyes.

Later that night, Seungmin doesn’t sleep. He waits until it’s late enough for it to be morning in Seoul, and calls Minho.

He picks up in a tired voice, “Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Seungmin.” Minho pronounces his name gently. “Isn’t it late over there?”

“Not that late,” Seungmin says, glancing at his clock that reads 3:22AM.

“You sound weird.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

Seungmin lets out a heavy sigh, and Minho hums in understanding. “Oh, you’re angry.”

“What?”

“You’re angry,” Minho continues. “I can hear it.”

Seungmin bites the inside of his cheek and turns on his side, wincing at the pain emitting from the tender bruises. Blue light washes over his starlit walls. “I’m not angry. Your ears aren’t working right.”

“Sure, and you’re lousy at lying.”

“I’m not lying,” Seungmin retorts, and makes the mistake of letting a hard edge be heard in his voice. He grimaces and tries to soften his tone. “I’m not -- I’m not angry. I’m just -- I don’t know. It’s puberty. It’s the hormones and the mood swings.”

“It’s more than that.”

“No it’s not.”

“It is.”

“You know me. You know it _is_ just that.”

“I don’t,” Minho says impatiently. “I _don’t_ know you and I don’t think I ever have -- not even as children, and especially not now.”

Seungmin opens his mouth. Closes it. He wishes he could see Minho’s expression so he has an idea of what to say.

“You’re angry, Seungmin,” he barrels on. “You just never want to admit it. You never talk about it. You think it’ll all just go away when you grow up but it doesn’t. There are no solutions to some things because they can’t be fixed. They can only be carried, so you have to learn how to manage them. And right now, you’re doing a shitty job at that.”

“You don’t get to be a hypocrite,” Seungmin harshly whispers, hands shaking so hard he can barely keep the phone still. “ _I_ never talk about it? What about you?”

“That’s different -- “

“How?”

“If you haven’t forgotten already, my living situation wasn’t exactly a big secret to everyone in that fucking place,” Minho snaps. “I didn’t need to say it for you to understand.”

Seungmin can feel the forest fire. He tries to not let it consume him.

“I’m not angry,” he says, but the crack in his voice gives away the truth, and he squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m not angry. I'm _not_. I’m not your dad and I’m not mine.”

There’s a pause of flickering thoughts. It’s funny, because Seungmin can taste the panic from the other line, reminiscent of the day Minho swooped in on their first, real summer together where he had stammered out clumsy comfort. “Seungmin -- “

Seungmin doesn’t want to listen anymore so he ends the call. He tosses his phone across the room and stares at the stars on his ceiling. He stands up on his bed, reaches for them, and rips them off.

 _I’m not angry,_ he chants in his head as he yanks the tapestries off from the walls. _I’m not angry,_ he repeats as he tears down the star chart and crumples up the maps in his hands. _I’m not angry,_ he echoes as he throws all his books on the stars into the trash. _I’m not angry_ \-- and he’s desperate in wanting to believe it but anger is a shapeless, immeasurable thing that can't be bounded. It’s like he was trying to stuff something into a box that was too small for it to fit. And Seungmin knows it won’t fit and knows there’s no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop him from trying to crush it into the box anyway, because he wants to punish the thing for not being able to fit properly.

But the thing is -- _Seungmin_ was the box, _he_ was the thing that didn’t fit, and _he_ was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.

He is not smart or mature. He is unwanted and angry. This is the bone-deep anger. This is the inheritance his father left behind. This is the carnage and the erosion and the bloody shards of sea glass. And this, is the realization of it.

Seungmin grabs his phone and calls Minho back.

The line rings twice when Minho picks up again, but he doesn’t say anything. There is a long silence until Seungmin accidentally sniffles too loud and he realizes he's crying when he's told himself to never cry anymore.

"You're right," Minho finally says, unwavering. “You're not. You’re neither of them. You’re just Seungmin.”

"I'm me,” he repeats wobbly. “I’m just me.”

“You’re just you,” Minho confirms, and there is fondness in his voice that makes Seungmin’s face crumple. “You’re just the boy with his cup of stars.”

Minho stays on the phone with him. Seungmin listens to him speak of mundane things, of warm nothings -- fig sweet upon his tongue. He closes his eyes, the tears dried to putty on his cheeks, and is lulled to sleep by Minho telling him that he is good and loved and not their fathers until the sun comes up.

“I love you,” his sister says.

Seungmin is sure she heard him tearing off tape to piece his stars and tapestries back together -- although some were barely salvageable -- because she hugs him tightly like she was scared of letting him go. He doesn’t know what to say so he stays quiet. Her hair smells like rainforests, shiny in the springtide skylight.

“I’m glad you're here, you know that?” she whispers. “I’m glad you didn’t get in the car that day. I am so, so glad. I’m sorry for all the things I’ve said and all the things I didn’t do. But you have to know that I love you -- I chose _you_ , I chose _this_ , and I’ve never regretted it since.”

Seungmin blinks. His bruised hands shake from holding onto ghosts too tight for so long. He thinks it is a sign to let go. “Thank you for loving me when it was hard, noona.”

He laughs a bit when he hears her sniffle. The Kim’s are crybabies.

Hyunjin takes it upon himself to seek out the boys who hurt Seungmin. He didn’t think Hyunjin had been serious about his black belt in taekwondo because he has the penchant for dramatizing his feats, but then one day after school, Hyunjin is suddenly dragging the roughed up bullies by their collars over to the gate so they can apologize to Seungmin. It was weird. The boys scurry away when Hyunjin lets go of them and he dusts off his hands with a harrumph.

“Stop being passive, Seungmin! Where’s that fighter in you? Punch their balls or something!” Hyunjin exclaims, jabbing a finger at Seungmin’s chest that has him doubling over in pain. “Oh, shit. Sorry.”

“I can fight in other ways,” he wheezes.

Seungmin is a well-adjusted young man, but he’s capable of justified evil. He floods the lockers of those bullies with water balloons and smiles at their dumbstruck faces. They do not know that the balloons were not filled with actual water but, in fact, filled with diluted cat pee, but that is what Seungmin finds most delight from -- their ignorant misfortune.

He may have picked up on Minho’s evil laugh. Hyunjin surely thinks so too.

Summer rolls around soon enough. Seungmin doesn’t leave right away when he graduates high school.

He knows that Hyunjin’s parents will be relocating back to South Korea since they moved to the suburbs for a quiet, different reprieve from the main city so one of his moms can work on her novel. Hyunjin texts Seungmin his address so that when the time is right, he is welcome to visit. They keep in touch more frequently than him and Minho.

Seungmin doesn’t remember the last time they talked, but he does remember the last thing Minho said to him, and it was this: “Take care of yourself for me, and I’ll take care of myself for you.”

He thinks about that a lot. Seungmin looks at their text history and wonders if it will stay untouched for another long time.

But then Seungmin thinks it’s a good thing. It’ll give him enough space and time to move on from his feelings, but then he realizes it’s too late when that fizzle pop crush has already turned into something more -- into something massive and terrifying. Seungmin doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know how to quietly leave things behind when he leaves fragments of himself too, as if they were seeds waiting to sprout and grow.

The sky has been clearer, these days. If Seungmin could bottle the sky, rich and cloudless in the summer, and give it to Minho to keep as a last parting gift, he would.

So, Seungmin works on a better him in the meantime. He stands in the sunlight and lets himself be warm. He seeks out more cats to rescue and tries to channel his inner feline (weird!) to avoid getting scratched at, and it works, because he successfully climbs down a tree with a fat tabby cat in the hood of his jacket. He takes care of her and makes sure her cardboard shelter stays intact during the rainfalls.

“Want a name?” he whispers, scratching behind her ears. “Um. I dunno. Joanne? Oh -- no? No? Don’t -- _ow_! Stop scratching me, ugly! You know what? I’ll name you after Minho hyung instead, because you’re mean and stupid and ungrateful.”

He leaves his bedroom starless. It feels bare and empty, but Seungmin thinks of the stars at sea and prefers the real thing over the fake ones. He acknowledges his anger and learns to work through it with the help of a therapist from the city, who is a friend of Old Jung's and is kind enough to offer a discount for Seungmin. When Seungmin feels calm at the sight of his father's feeble apparition, and only thinks of the sound of his sister's laughter, he thinks he may be healing.

At some point in the year, he even gets a job at a grocery store. He waves at a baby in a stroller, and when it waves back, the mother laughs and says, “she likes you.” Seungmin thinks he is the sort of person who can be liked.

Then, one night, as she’s painting her nails, his sister asks him, “Have you thought of what you want to do yet, Minnie?”

Seungmin pauses the show on her laptop. “You mean for school?”

“Mhm. Your second gap year is already ending soon,” she says. “I always thought you’d do something with the stars you like so much.”

There is only one star he likes the most but Seungmin stays quiet. He thinks about it -- or has been thinking about it for a while now. He thinks about his dad’s fading figure that shows up on bad days but disappears on the good days. He thinks about Mr. Lee rotting in the family ruins of his cape cod house. He thinks about Minho’s mosaic skin and wounded fists and fervid desperation to get out of the gutters.

Maybe he can channel all that spite into making the world a better place for kids like them. His anger is still there, still tremendous, but his love has always been bigger.

“Criminal law,” he finally answers.

His sister looks proud. “Alright.” She smiles. “It’s your life, after all.”

Seungmin blinks. He looks down at his hands. He is alive. He wants to live like a tree to the sun -- to grow towards the light. He is alive and this is his life and nobody else’s.

It is that summer that he finally looks at Minho’s social media after another entire year of radio silence. Minho’s feed is empty, but when Seungmin clicks on the icon in the shape of a person’s silhouette, he sees the myriad of photos Minho has been tagged in. It feels like he’s discovered a treasure cove he wasn’t supposed to unearth.

Most of the photos were candids of Minho looking elsewhere. He’s resting his head on the shoulder of a young, freckled man smiling; is a blurry figure when he is captured mid-motion; and is covering his face with an upside down book in a cafe ambiance. There is a group photo of him and his friends, drunk in the night, and Minho is grinning at the camera, eyes crinkling with a wave of light.

It was like watching a condensed time-lapse of Minho growing older. He’s lost the baby fat on his face and his hair has been cut to a flattering length with bangs that bounced above his eyelids. Minho looks older, prettier. Happier.

Seungmin wonders if there is still a spot for him in his life. Sometimes, there are no explanations for endings -- just the consequences of time and distance. Maybe this is their ending. Maybe this is the finalization of it.

His fingers hover above the keyboard after he pulls up their abandoned messages. He is scared of not receiving a reply, but perhaps it will give him the closure he needs to finally move on. So, he asks, _how are you?_ when he really means, _are you happy?_ Seungmin falls asleep with his phone on his chest.

When he wakes up, there are two new notifications from Minho -- one from Instagram alerting him that Minho has posted something for the first time -- and another one from their chats. Seungmin blinks away the bleariness from his vision and wonders if he was in a dream.

**Minho-hyung (2:09AM)**  
_I’m good_  
_And you?_

Simple, succinct. Minho sent his reply ten minutes after Seungmin had messaged him. This is the first time Minho has replied to him so promptly. Seungmin checks Instagram next and pulls up Minho’s profile.

It’s a photo of a sky -- blue and clear, dappled by soft, white clouds. In the caption, it reads: _wish you were here._

Seungmin feels a sudden surge of tenderness so rare he is displaced by it. He stares at those words until his eyes grow sore and repeats them with his own postcard mouth: _wish you were here too._

✩

**You (10:45PM)**  
_i’m good. i'm better_

**You (9:43AM)**  
_see you later._

✩

Seungmin leaves the suburbs the next summer.

Old Jung offers his best wishes for him and sticks out a hand for Seungmin, but instead of a measly handshake, Seungmin hugs him. He promises to write to Old Jung whenever he can so that he doesn’t feel lonely without the brats making a menace in his basement.

Old Jung laughs gruffly and musses up his hair. “I’d like that a lot, kid.”

Seungmin has saved enough from working odd jobs, but his sister transfers some of her own money to his bank account, to which he vehemently declines, but she reassures him that all her earnings have been fruitful for being a hot commodity these days. She will be flying to New York in a few weeks for a fashion show, then to Milan, and then maybe to Seoul.

“Say hi to Minho for me,” she says at the airport, when she brings Seungmin forward to press a kiss to his forehead. He closes his eyes and laughs at the thought.

“Okay.”

When Seungmin arrives at the international airport, he spots Hyunjin immediately by the colour of his pale hair. He stands tall and poised, wearing a pair of Ray ban sunglasses and a ruffled Gucci blouse. He reeks of more wealth than he did back in the suburbs.

“I think you’re feeding into the dumb blonde stereotype too much,” is the first thing Seungmin says to him.

Hyunjin lets out the broadest laugh Seungmin has ever heard, and he pulls him into a warm hug. “Nice to see you too, asshole!”

They catch up as Hyunjin drives them back to his penthouse, to which he had kindly offered for Seungmin to stay in for an indefinite time. Hyunjin talks about majoring in media and communications, and Seungmin talks a bit about his own plans for his upcoming classes. Their conversation slowly turns idle, reminding Seungmin of their old school days, and muses how childhood had seemed so long ago.

Seungmin presses his head against the window and watches the stippled line of skyscrapers tower over them as they drive through the overpass. He spots the misty silhouette of Lotte Tower in the distance. It’s cold in the car, so he tries to fog up the window with his breath. It doesn’t work, but he draws a star anyway.

“I told Minho-hyung, by the way.”

Seungmin blinks. He whips his head around to look at Hyunjin, who spits out a curse and slams a fist against the car horn when he gets cut off by another car.

“What do you mean you told him?”

“Uh, that you’re here?” Hyunjin snorts, flashing a middle finger at the driver through the window when he passes them. “I had a feeling you didn’t tell him you were moving here, and I was right, ‘cause Minho-hyung looked like he wanted to sacrifice my entrails for the devil when _you’re_ the one he’s upset at. Do you see how painful it is to be the third wheel and the punching bag for you two? This is way above my pay grade.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide it from him,” Seungmin says. “It’s called selective omittance of facts.”

Hyunjin glances at him. “Okay,” he drawls. “Why did you decide to omit _this_ , then?”

Seungmin shrugs. He stares at the unchanging blue of the sky. There’s a lot of reasons why. He’s scared, he’s nervous, and he’s not sure if this was the right thing to do when he doesn’t know where he stands anymore in Minho's life. “I don’t know.”

At that, Hyunjin lets out a frustrated groan. “Ugh!” He jabs at the horn with a fist. “You guys are so annoying!”

Seungmin looks at him in concern, but then he’s holding onto dear life when Hyunjin takes a sharp turn down a route that did not take them to the penthouse. They end up parked outside a modest apartment building on a descending hill instead, situated between a small convenience store and a shophouse covered by wooden crates of bright persimmons.

“Where are we?” he asks, confused.

“ _Zip_ ,” Hyunjin says, pressing a finger up to Seungmin’s lips. “You. Shut up. Follow me.”

Seungmin follows him up the apartment building. The sky is turning into the colour of marigolds, silhouetted by hanging power lines and a flock of birds that took off across the sky in bloodied plumage. He jumps with a start when Hyunjin takes him by the collar of his jacket and drags him forward since he was lagging behind. They suddenly stop and Hyunjin sharply knocks on a door to a unit.

“Who are we -- “

Hyunjin quickly pushes Seungmin in front of him. “Every man for themselves!”

It doesn’t register that Hyunjin is _leaving_ him there as he’s leaping down the stairs until the engine of his car roars back to life. Seungmin stammers to nothing but thin air, about to run after him, when he hears the door unlock and wrench open. His breath seizes; his words collapse upon themselves and Seungmin clamps his mouth shut like he always does.

Minho is pain pinned to muscle, the dark arteries of quiet. Unwavering, he stands there with star-like distance between them, hands curled into fists that are tucked into crossed arms. He stares at Seungmin without a word, his jaw shut tight like rigor mortis, and Seungmin can see the familiar texture of his skin -- the icy cloudlight in his eyes that is different in real life than in the photos he’s seen.

It has been five years since they’ve met in person. Seungmin doesn’t want to imagine to what extent the emptiness must’ve stretched to by now. But he chooses to be the first one to break the glacial silence.

“Hi,” he says.

Minho slams the door shut in his face.

Seungmin blinks. He opens his mouth, closes it, then scrunches up his face. “That’s kinda rude.”

The door opens again after a few minutes. Minho doesn’t look any different than before but he jerks his head, inviting Seungmin in. He doesn’t spare a second to hesitate and walks in to escape the summer heat.

It’s a neat and simple apartment, but Seungmin notices the clutter of sisal towers and scratching posts and litter boxes, and doesn’t quite understand until he feels something soft brush against his ankle. He looks down at a striped, orange and white cat.

“You have a cat,” Seungmin says. He spots another cat of the same colour hanging from the ledge of the balcony door, and a grey cat curled up in a blanket. “You have cats.”

Minho crouches down to scratch behind the cat’s ears. “Soonie likes you.”

Seungmin bends down to offer a hand to Soonie, to which he nudges his head against the back of his hand. He looks up when Minho heads to the kitchen. Seungmin pets Soonie on the head before he stands up and follows after him.

Minho bangs the cupboards shut when he asks, “Do you want tea.”

“Uh -- “

“I’m making tea,” he says and sets the kettle down on the stove. He turns around and leans against the kitchen sink, crossing his arms as he levels Seungmin an unamused stare.

The silence between them builds like geothermal pressure. Seungmin twiddles with his fingers behind his back as he deliberately looks around the place while trying to ignore the pair of knives at his throat. But then, he saw it -- hanging there on the mug rack, small and old but polished at its cleanest, was his cup of stars.

He’s moving towards it before he realizes. Seungmin carefully takes it off the rack and looks at the stars painted at the bottom. He whispers, “You have it.”

Minho is quiet, but then there’s the sound of tentative footsteps and Seungmin can feel Minho standing close to him from behind. “You’re the one who put it in my bag.”

“Yeah,” Seungmin snorts. “It was easy to sneak it in between your clothes.”

“Why?”

Seungmin swallows. He hooks it back onto the mug rack. “I thought you would forget about me.”

Minho is silent. He moves away when the kettle begins to shriek. Seungmin watches him take two tea bags out of a jar and place them in the cups. He fills them up with water and lets the tea steep in one of the cups for a few minutes before he takes it out when it’s still light yellow, because he still remembers that Seungmin doesn’t like his tea too dark.

They don’t speak for a while. Minho stares down at the cups of tea. Then, he’s opening his mouth to ask, “Why didn’t you tell me you were moving here?”

“We stopped talking.”

“Doesn’t mean we stopped being friends.”

“Did you mean it?”

Minho looks up at him, then. “Mean what?”

“When you told me to follow you. Did you mean it?”

“Of course I did.”

“Do you still mean it?” Seungmin asks quietly. “Because I’m here now. It took me a long time but I’m here now, hyung. If you don’t want me anymore just say so and I’ll leave. You can say no. You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no.”

“You are so annoying,” Minho intones, and lifts the cup of tea for Seungmin to take.

Seungmin looks down at the tea made just the way he likes it. He hesitates, but when he slowly reaches for it, Minho abruptly puts the cup down onto the counter and takes Seungmin’s outstretched hand into his. He pulls him forward, and then Seungmin is suddenly inhaling the too-soft place of Minho’s neck, and Minho has his arms around his shoulders with one hand cradling the back of his head. The scent of lavender soap still clings to his warm skin.

“I want you.” His voice is firm, strong. “So stay, idiot.”

Seungmin closes his eyes. He once tried to give up on Minho, to pluck the idea of him out of his heart, but the more Seungmin tried to take him out of it the more Minho stayed there. Maybe this is natural, too -- that there is closure in this, in knowing that it will always be Minho and no one else. It will always be him, even if it isn’t reciprocated.

“Okay.”

✩

Seungmin doesn’t end up staying at Hyunjin’s penthouse. Minho’s roommate, Changbin, recently moved out in order to live with his partner, so that means a room has been freed up. Minho tells Seungmin to live with him. Seungmin says sure.

The cicadas sing in his ears and sunlight pools over his head on early mornings. Summer is wet and humid in Seoul, but Minho still takes him around for him to re-familiarize with the infrastructure. They cut the strings of their estrangement with stilted words and tender hands. Seungmin tells Minho he wants to be a child advocate lawyer, and Minho shares he’s studying social work. It’s funny, knowing they’re working towards the same goal in different ways.

“We’ll be good,” Minho says.

“I know,” Seungmin says, and knocks their elbows together.

In the same summer, Seungmin meets the rest of Minho’s odd constellation of friends.

“See?” Hyunjin exclaims as he’s draping himself over Seungmin’s shoulders, whining into his ear, as they’re sitting outside in the shade on a picnic blanket. “This is way above my pay grade. The three of us are finally reunited and now I’m back to third-wheeling!”

“Does that mean we’re eight-wheeling then?” Felix asks, confused, and Seungmin recognizes him as the freckled boy from Minho’s tagged photos. The picnic had been his idea, and the food he brought was delicious, but if Seungmin had to endure another minute of that one, single mosquito pestering him, then Seungmin might just toss the entire picnic basket into the river.

Chan looks concerned. “Eight-wheeling? Why does that sound so weird?”

“Weird? Nah, man. It sounds like some sexual innuendo.” Changbin snorts.

“Hyunjin,” Minho says, snapping his chopsticks in his face. “Stop talking for once and use that mouth to eat instead of spewing a bunch of bullshit.”

“Bullshit? _You’re_ bullshit -- no, I’m joking hyung, please don’t put that in my ear -- “

“So, Seungmin,” Jisung pipes in, stealing a kimbap from Changbin’s container. “You’re the reason why Minho-hyung works at the planetarium in Anseong, huh? I thought he was a real space nerd at first, but then it turns out he knows absolutely _nothing_ about it -- “

Seungmin looks at Minho. “You work at a planetarium?”

“ -- he can’t even tell the fundamental difference between a cluster and a galaxy, like, what a looooser -- “

“They were hiring and I was desperate,” Minho says with an affectation of indifference, but the colour on his face belies such an act.

“ -- so then I asked him why he works there of all things and he said it’s because the stars remind him of an important person back home and I’m, like, goddamn bro, where’s that heart of yours when _I’m_ in desperate need of attention -- “

With bright red ears, Minho crushes a roll of kimbap and shuts Jisung up by feeding him it. “I will literally kill you if you continue.”

At the telltale sign of a flatulent noise, Hyunjin shrieks and shoves Jisung to the side. "Dude, what the fuck, did you just _fart_?"

"What? Nooo," Jisung drawls as he makes kissy faces at him. "I just blew you a kiss with my ass."

"That is so _gros_ _s_."

“Wait, are we all ganging up Minho-hyung right now? Like, right now?” Jeongin asks, pausing in the middle of inhaling his potato salad as Changbin dabs at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “Can I start? Please? _Please_?”

“Correction: I will kill you _all_ ," Minho threatens.

"I didn't even do anything!" Felix shouts.

Chan looks close to tears. “I don’t have enough manpower to hide multiple murders.”

“He used to climb up trees to save cats,” Seungmin says.

Everyone is paralyzed into silence. Then, all at once, they’re barraging Minho with a bunch of questions and start to coo and pull at his cheeks and ears, exaggerating the polarity of his character.

Seungmin smiles impishly at an embarrassed Minho being terrorized by his friends; he decides that he likes them already.

Seungmin knows how to deal with change, and knows the both of them have changed in more ways than one, but then Seungmin will see Minho make the same ramen dish from six years ago, and hear him mutter familiar, useless things in his sleep, and buy the same brand of yuja tea from their childhood. It throws Seungmin off-kilter to see a much older Minho do the same things he’s done as a kid.

But it’s not the same as when they were kids anymore, where they stuck close together because they were all each other had. This is a choice. This is muscle memory. This is the subtle descent, the lack of conscious effort from having been ingrained in each other’s lives for so long, where “I only have you” has unwittingly turned into “I want to be with you”.

Most of all, they learn to map out each other’s boundaries as they navigate through the bad and good days together. Anger has become a friend rather than an enemy but Seungmin is not perfect. He doesn't think okay exists, but with each other, maybe they will learn what okay can be.

(“Can I hug you?” Seungmin asks, sitting by Minho’s bedside.

“Don’t give me the puppy eyes,” he says, pushing Seungmin’s face away. “I haven’t showered in four days.”

Seungmin hugs him anyway. “Oh well. That’s the way I like you the best.”)

On his sister's 29th birthday, Minho takes up his entire morning by sending his sister a long birthday message over Kakao. Then, he asks Seungmin, “Seongja-noona still likes black forest cake, right? I’m going to try to order it for her. Where is she right now, again?”

“I think Japan.”

Minho lets out a low whistle. “Livin’ the life, huh? I’m happy for her. Okay, now, do you understand Japanese or do I have to Google translate this delivery app?”

There’s a sense of deja vu from trying to get along with the cats. Doongie and Dori don’t really like Seungmin except for Soonie. While he’s reading a book on the couch one day, Soonie comes over to sit down on his open book and does nothing but stare up at him.

“Soonie,” he complains, doing absolutely nothing to dislodge the cat. “You’re so fucking dumb. You can’t even read.”

But he makes the mistake of insulting Soonie out in the open when Minho comes home at an unfortunately convenient time to have overheard him. “Hey,” he says, somewhat out of breath as he stands there all sweaty and gross from work. “Did you just call my cat dumb?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. Tell him to get off my book.”

“Soonie, stay there!”

Seungmin grumbles unintelligibly and spends the rest of his quiet, summer night scratching all of Soonie’s sweet spots. It’s weird. It’s familiar. But Seungmin has missed this a lot.

Summer comes to an end, but the inkling of something good hangs above his head. Come his birthday, Minho tosses a gift bag inundated with messy tissue paper at Seungmin’s chest, and curtly says, “Wear this.”

Startled, Seungmin dives forward to catch the present in his clumsy hands, scaring Soonie away from where he was ripping up the pages of Seungmin’s poor book with his claws.

He turns the gift around, inspecting it with dismay. “I thought we don’t do gifts anymore.”

“Can you at least open it first before you talk back?”

Seungmin huffs and takes out all the tissue paper. He sees something soft, something pale blue, and then he freezes. He whips his head up to stare at Minho with wide eyes, but he’s pretending Seungmin doesn’t exist for a moment as he’s tidying up the cushions of the couch, hands flitting about in a nervous thrum.

Seungmin looks back down. With shaky hands, he takes the sweater out. The bag drops to the floor. In the motes of pale dust, lingering autumn heat, the afterimages of them in places they haven’t been in years -- Seungmin unfolds it up in the air and looks at the tiny, yellow moon embroidered on the left side of the sweater.

“I bought it the day before I left,” he hears Minho explain. “I took it with me because I was waiting to give it to you here.”

He’s at the bottom of the swimming pool, watching light cut through the surface, but then he’s suddenly burning. The forest fire returns but it isn’t born from anger but out of love and it consumes him and burns into his skin and leaves behind a mark.

Seungmin looks up when Minho gently runs a thumb underneath his eye. “All these years, huh,” he says, “and still a crybaby.”

Seungmin isn’t sure why he’s crying. “I’m not crying,” he denies, through his tears.

“Sure.” Minho pinches Seungmin’s wet cheeks and moves them around like a playdough. “Stupid.”

Seungmin is going to wear it. He is going to wear it because it is his favourite sweater, and it is his favourite sweater because Minho is the one who gave it to him, and every time he looks at Minho it feels like he’s wearing his favourite sweater.

But he won’t wear it now -- not yet. He wants to keep it pristine, present. He wants to look at it in his closet instead of the window of a clothing boutique. He wants to memorize it in his hands instead of another’s.

And so, he thinks of the stars and asks, “Can we go to the beach?”

“Why are we at the beach.”

Minho has asked that for the seventh time as he’s zipping up his jacket to his neck, locking the doors of his car, though he didn’t seem averse to the idea when Seungmin first asked him. They walk past silver grass and towards the sand, with Seungmin a few steps ahead.

The sun is setting in the distance, a disc cut in half by the ocean lit ablaze, painting the sky in vermillion and gold. There are a few families dotting around the area, but Seungmin moves towards the shore. Once he reaches the fringe of it, he takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his pants, and runs into the water.

Minho shouts after him, but Seungmin laughs and stops not too far when the water wades higher than his ankles. There’s a litany of muttered swears as Minho curses the cold water. Once he stops beside Seungmin, he asks, “Are you crazy?”

“Maybe,” Seungmin lilts.

“You are acting so weird right now.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

Seungmin bumps their shoulders. Minho knocks their elbows. Seungmin smiles and thinks it’s the burn in his heart that has him acting this way, all dappy and unencumbered, catching the seas on fire.

He looks up at the soft, peach clouds in a sky that wasn't clear enough to show the stars yet, but Seungmin knows they’re there even if he can’t see them. His body feels breathless from running through wet sand dunes, the smell of brine in his nose and a splashing ocean at his feet. With the sunset blooming away, it feels like a climax to something. The end or the beginning of something young.

Seungmin knows right then, that he’ll always want this, that he will never want anything else ever again as much as this. He thinks of the future and all he can see is Minho's face over and over again. 

“Hyung,” he says, no longer afraid, “let’s continue to grow old together.”

Minho doesn’t say anything. He stands there, cascaded by the setting sun, staring at Seungmin like he’s heard wrong. But then, Seungmin smiles; he slowly lifts a hand and reaches for the star, and gently presses his thumb beneath Minho’s left eye, covering the violent memory with a light touch.

“Kim Seungmin,” Minho says lowly, and his voice is wavering, “I’m right here.”

“I know.”

“I’ve always been here.” Minho circles a hand around Seungmin’s wrist. “It’s you. It’s _you_ who always thinks too much -- who thinks you can't have me, when you can."

“I know.”

“You’re so stupid.”

“I know.”

“You still love me, don’t you.”

Seungmin blinks. He thinks of the cliff. He thinks of the exposed nerve when he jumped off and how he hasn't stopped falling since then. “I never stopped.”

Minho lets go of his wrist. A burnished gold light reflects off of his eyes, and his ears turn the same shade as the burning ocean, but he’s smiling. He’s smiling, and all his laugh lines appear, and Seungmin smiles too.

“Then sure,” Minho says and gently cups his cheeks, as though Seungmin’s head was a star between his hands. “Let’s grow old together, stupid.”

Seungmin is twenty-one. He learns what love is through his perfectly made tea and the cup of stars that hang quietly from the mug rack. He learns what love is from watching Minho save all those tiny tadpoles and lonely, stray cats. He learns what love is when he sees his sister bring that cardboard ribbon medal with her everywhere she goes, and when Old Jung writes back saying he has been sober for a year now. He learns what love is, when he leans in to empty his heart and Minho meets him halfway.

Seungmin is twenty-one, with warm lips pressed against his, when he finally understands what a true home feels like.

**Author's Note:**

> i just . [clenches fist] love childhood friends... ok THANK U ALL FOR READING !!!! the "cup of stars" is like a reference from the haunting of hill house. but just that bc i really like the cup of stars ;v;
> 
> THERE IS FANART !!!!!!! PLS look at the amazing fanart by [hollyeonie](https://twitter.com/hollyeonie/status/1354437388538265604?s=19) & [ minlxer](https://twitter.com/minlxer/status/1354466017838161923?s=19) & [t0birooo](https://twitter.com/t0birooo/status/1354527152029503488?s=19) & [minlixlop](https://twitter.com/minlixlop/status/1354812640824967168) & [linothinker](https://twitter.com/Iinothinker/status/1355193504033624065) & [P4NDAMI](https://twitter.com/P4NDAMI/status/1355353265882361858) & [galactic_mingi](https://twitter.com/galactic_mingi/status/1359610705402617862)
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/suncygnus) | [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/sunsprite)


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